Current Berkman People and Projects

Keep track of Berkman-related news and conversations by subscribing to this page using your RSS feed reader. This aggregation of blogs relating to the Berkman Center does not necessarily represent the views of the Berkman Center or Harvard University but is provided as a convenient starting point for those who wish to explore the people and projects in Berkman's orbit. As this is a global exercise, times are in UTC.

March 21, 2019

By focusing on providing positive female role models for computer science in our schools, and supporting girls and young women in their endeavors, we can send a strong message that computer science is for everyone.

March 20, 2019

Author Nanjala Nyabola speaks with BKC Fellow james Wahutu about Nanjala's book, Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Kenya. The book explores of efforts to contain online activism, new methods of feminist mobilization, and how “fake news,” Cambridge Analytica, and allegations of hacking contributed to tensions around the 2017 elections.
For more about this event visit:https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-03-12/digital-democracy-analogue-politics

Yesterday was the official publication date of Essential Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science, co-authored with my former CS20 teaching assistant Rachel Zax, now at Google. It's meant to be a quick trip through all the mathematical subjects students need to do computer science but wouldn't get in their calculus and linear algebra courses. The publisher, Princeton University Press, has done a great job holding the price down. They have made it available in electronic form at an even lower price than the print edition.

This project started when I designed CS20 almost ten years ago (see "Reinventing the Classroom" for the genesis of that course). I needed an affordable text that covered a variety of topics not usually packaged together. There wasn't one (remember, I said "affordable"). I made do with a variety of online materials, mostly designed for a more mathematically sophisticated audience. Rachel, who had worked with me on the course when I taught it for the first time in the spring of 2012, suggested we should write a book. Here's the end result, only seven years in the making!

The cover art illustrates a famous theorem treated early in the book. The English language statement of the theorem is that in any group of six people, there are either 3 who all know each other or 3 who are mutually unknown to each other. (Take your pick as to which of red and blue represents knowing and which represents not knowing.) It's a nice example of how to translate that into math-speak and then prove that it's always true--pretty typical of the material in the book!

The acknowledgements thank (by name) everyone who was a teaching assistant while I was teaching the course; a terrific group, mostly of Harvard math and CS undergrads. They really made it fun to teach this material, and I hope that comes through in the book!

March 12, 2019

Roger McNamee is the author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. He is joined by Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School.
Facebook, Google and other internet platforms employ a business model – surveillance capitalism – that is undermining public health, democracy, privacy, and innovation in unprecedented ways. They use persuasive technology to manipulate attention for profit and they use surveillance to build data sets with the goal of influencing user behavior.
The negative externalities of internet platforms are analogous to those of medicine in the early 20th century and chemicals in the mid-20th century, situations that required substantial regulatory intervention.
For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-02-26/waking-internet-platform-disaster

In this talk, Professor Woodrow Hartzog argues that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products.
Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation.
Hartzog speaks on the need to develop the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law that is responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust.
For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-03-05/privacys-blueprin

Why has the Internet had such a powerful impact? What are the challenges that may cause the Internet of tomorrow to be significantly less revolutionary than the Internet to date?
This talk provides a history of the reasons for and the technology of the Internet.
Scott Bradner has worked in the areas of computer programming, system management, networking, IT security, and identity management at Harvard for 50 years. He was involved in the design, operation and use of data networks at Harvard University since the early days of the ARPANET. He was involved in the design of the original Harvard data networks, the Longwood Medical Area network (LMAnet) and New England Academic and Research Network (NEARnet). He was founding chair of the technical committees of LMAnet, NEARnet and the Corporation for Research and Enterprise Network (CoREN).
Mr. Bradner served in a number of roles in the IETF. He was the co-director of the Operational Requirements Area (1993-1997), IPng Area (1993-1996), Transport Area (1997-2003) and Sub-IP Area (2001-2003). He was a member of the IESG (1993-2003) and was an elected trustee of the Internet Society (1993-1999), where he was the VP for Standards from 1995 to 2003 and Secretary to the Board of Trustees from 2003 to 2016. Scott was also a member of the IETF Administrative Support Activity (IASA) as well as a trustee of the IETF Trust from 2012 to 2016.
Mr. Bradner retired from Harvard University in 2016 after 50 years working in the areas of in computer programming, system management, networking, IT security and identity management. He continues to do some patent related consulting.
More about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-02-05/history-internet

March 10, 2019

Several clear-headed pieces have appeared about the student demands that Professor Ronald Sullivan resign from—or be removed from—his position as faculty dean of Winthrop House because of his service as counsel to Harvey Weinstein. I bloggedearlier about Professor Randall Kennedy’s commentaryin the Chronicle of Higher Education. (This link should work for readers with Harvard Library privileges.) In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer for the magazine, has an equally thoughtful piece called “In defense of Harvey Weinstein’s Harvard lawyer.” He cites the student petition, which states that Sullivan’s “defense of such a figure induces a great amount of fear and hurt in victims of the crimes that Weinstein is accused of,” and then discusses John Adams defending the British soldiers, which Kevin Cullen used as a basis for his satirical column, but puts a less comic spin on it by quoting Adams himself on the price he paid:

In the Evening I expressed to Mrs. Adams all my Apprehensions: That excellent Lady, who has always encouraged me, burst into a flood of Tears, but said she was very sensible of all the Danger to her and to our Children as well as to me, but she thought I had done as I ought, she was very willing to share in all that was to come and place her trust in Providence.

The pattern has been repeated throughout U.S. history. “Defense attorneys for Communists made many feel angry and unsafe,” Friedersdorf writes, recalling the McCarthy era, and then moving to the present, “Defense attorneys for al-Qaeda terrorists made many feel angry and unsafe.”

So people always get upset at lawyers who defend unpopular clients, and societies that value civil liberties and individual rights have to teach every new generation why lawyers should not be identified with their clients nor subjected to any guilt by association. Ever. 52 Harvard Law School professors make the point in a letter in the Boston Globe. President Drew Findling of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers made the point very bluntly in a powerful statement (in the NACDL Twitter feed):

NACDL notes with chagrin the tenor of the student protests against Professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. related to his representation of Harvey Weinstein. There are few constitutionally-ordained roles in our democracy. One such role is that of the criminal defense lawyer. Indeed, the Sixth Amendment specifically provides that 'In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to have the Assistance of Counsel[.]' There are no exceptions, ever, and no lawyer should ever be criticized or condemned for taking on any criminal case. Ever. This is a fundamental tenet of this nation. To the extent that there may or may not be other issues on the Harvard campus that bear on Professor Sullivan's role at Harvard, those issues should be addressed by the Harvard community without compromising or denigrating the right to counsel.

Writing for Bloomberg, Professor Steven Carter of Yale Law School makes similar arguments.

Judging the morality of lawyers by the morality of their clients carries echoes of the McCarthy Era, when Red-baiters would smear lawyers who represented Communists. The organized bar, rather than protect its members, joined in the condemnation. The result was predictable: Rather than take on unpopular clients, lawyers cowered in what U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas decried as a “black silence of fear.” …

More worrisome still is Harvard’s ominous promise to look into the “atmosphere” at Winthrop House. It suggests that the university believes that a faculty member’s choice of clients is a matter of administrative significance. And let’s not pretend to be naive: Nowadays, being investigated by campus authorities is tantamount to being convicted by them.

We’re a far cry from the days of Abbot Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard who developed the “house” system. Yes, Lowell had his many warts, but he did some good things. Here’s one of them: A century ago, during the runup to World War I, a Harvard professor was accused of supporting Germany. Editorialists wanted his head. Lowell’s response has justifiably gone down in history: “If a university or college censors what its professors may say, if it restrains them from uttering something that it does not approve, it thereby assumes responsibility for that which it permits them to say.”

The same reasoning, it seems to me, should apply to the selection of a client. Harvard could certainly adopt a rule holding that no faculty shall engage in outside legal work. Absent that, however, once the school decides to punish a professor for choosing the wrong client, it implicitly endorses the clients of others who are not punished.

If that’s the business Harvard wants to be in, then in all fairness the administration might as well come out and publish a list, right now, today, of acceptable and unacceptable clients. We might as well get a good clear look at the future.

Perhaps students are not making the error of conflating the client with his attorney. Perhaps they are passing judgment on their dean simply for the discomfort he causes them by the choices he makes in his private life. That explanation, while troubling, has the merit of consistency with Harvard’s view that students’ own off-campus associations (choosing to join a women’s club, for example) are its business—that having any “wrong” relationship may justify the College in passing judgment against you.

It is hard to know where such an extended reach would end, and for that reason I suspect any such basis for complaint is either not well thought through or a pretext for something else.

Whatever the underlying logic, the College, by instituting a review of the “climate” Sullivan is alleged to have created by his choice of clients, is honoring that confusion rather than trying to correct it. It is a chilling idea that a dean might be removed for creating a “climate” simply by associating, even professionally, with other people. It would be awfully hard to proscribe associations in order to avoid the risk that they might engender negative feelings in the House. A friend asked me: Could a faculty dean acknowledge having voted for Donald Trump without creating the sort of climate that would legitimize similar student feelings of unsafety? If so, Harvard would need to create a list of acceptable political positions, so both faculty and students could be warned in advance what they were allowed to think and say in the Houses.

It would be good, as they institute a review of the “climate” in Winthrop House, for the Harvard leaders to articulate the climate-creating role of the faculty dean. One is led to infer from the complaint and the response that faculty deans are expected to create a climate in which no one ever feels uncomfortable. I don’t know how else to interpret Harvard taking seriously the claim that Sullivan’s professional representation of Weinstein, who has as far as I know never set foot on Harvard property, makes them feel uncomfortable or unsafe. In an excellent interview in the New Yorker,Sullivan claims he is the first subject of such a climate review, but is contradicted by a Harvard spokesperson, who notes there was a climate review of another House on the basis of discomfort felt by LGBTQ students. It’s an interesting example, because that complaint seems to have been that the House was insufficiently “welcoming” to gay students. But there are religiously conservative students who have expressed discomfort about co-ed bathrooms and about the possibility they might have to live in a House headed by a same-sex couple. Their discomfort was rightly handled without a climate review threatening the removal of the dean. Why is the College taking so seriously the discomfort of the complainants against Sullivan?

Discomfort is part of life in a diverse community. That does not mean that it is OK for anyone to be unsafe, but a feeling of unsafety cannot be used as club to get rid of people or to make political points. And no one at Harvard has a right to safety from ideas they don’t like, for example, the idea that good lawyers defend terrible clients.

Medical School professor and former dean Jeffrey Flier argues that in failing to support Sullivan, Harvard’s leaders are not doing their full job.

What about the University’s response? Apart from Kennedy’s powerful piece and a few isolated tweets, there has been no official, institutional response from Harvard in support of Sullivan, although some other faculty have spoken up in his defense, many of them quoted in a recent piece about the brouhaha in the Atlantic. Sources tell me that a large number of HLS faculty penned a strong confidential letter defending Sullivan and sent it to University leaders, but so far it hasn’t received a reply. Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana met with Sullivan, after which he told the Crimson: “I take seriously the concerns that have been raised from members of the College community regarding the impact of Professor Sullivan’s choice to serve as counsel for Harvey Weinstein on the House community that he is responsible for leading as a faculty dean.” Khurana “communicated that that the College believes that more work must be done to uphold our commitment to the well-being of our students”— hardly a ringing endorsement of Professor Sullivan. He later announced a “climate survey” to assess the state of the Winthrop House community, an approach that, at a moment like this, seems to empower those seeking Sullivan’s removal.

What about Harvard’s other leaders? So far, they have said nothing. It is likely that back room discussions are dominated by institutional defensiveness, concerns about legal and communications matters, and barely concealed fear, given the explosive nature of such issues at other campuses. Title IX controversies are a constant concern, at Harvard and elsewhere, and Harvard has made serious mistakes in the past. The University now employs a large and increasingly complex organization to deal with claims of unwelcome environment, harassment and assault, as well as issues of “diversity and belonging,” a newly articulated goal now permeating the University. While diversity, belonging and sexual assault are unquestionably important issues, they are tangential to this situation, which concerns a respected faculty member whose supposed transgression is participating in the legal representation of an unpopular defendant. Perhaps the administration should strike a better balance between addressing student concerns and supporting a distinguished faculty member whose advisory role is being inappropriately questioned.

Even better, the administration could educate students about navigating the difficult transition to adulthood, which involves developing compartmentalized working relationships with people from whom we cannot easily step away. The world can be complicated, and the different roles we all play can interact in ways that require nuance and compromise. One of the things we don’t expect of high schoolers but do hope for from college graduates is to understand how to put up with imperfection in one place in the pursuit of larger ideals. If you discover that your landlord has a sexual assault conviction on his record, you cannot easily stop paying him rent money, or stop asking him to get rid of your cockroaches. If the father of your children disagrees with your politics, you can’t easily replace him with another. If your boss’s boss is abusive to his family, you can’t easily give up a good job and find one with better people all the way up the management chain, or demand that the company do something about matters in which you are involved only very peripherally. And if you don’t like some of the clients your lawyer has defended, you don’t go looking for one who defends only good people.

Of course, some of these analogies are imperfect. Everything Sullivan has done is honorable—just as John Adams said that his defense of the British soldiers was “one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.” These hypotheticals are simply examples of the kinds of uncomfortable situations they will encounter in their daily lives once they leave Harvard. We all face such situations regularly. It is possible in each case to get the discomfiting individual out of our lives—we can move out of the apartment, or quit the job, or get a divorce. But the cost is in each case high—and the new situation is likely to be no better than the old, and to be deficient in some other way. So what we generally do, in order to live productive lives rather than constantly seeking to avoid discomfort or expecting others to protect us from upsetting conditions, is to find proportional responses to our grievances so that we can focus our energy on the pursuit of our important objectives. That is not compromising our ideals; it’s pursuing them maturely.

So there is an important lesson Harvard should be teaching students about the civics of legal representation. But that is not all: it should also be helping them learn to live with the ambiguities of the world. The capacity to do that is one of the things we hope distinguish an 18-year-old high school graduate from a 22-year-old Harvard graduate, but Harvard can’t effect that change in students simply by sheltering them and waiting for four years to elapse. I made some suggestions earlier on (A teachable moment) on the educational opportunity here. It is not too late.

March 09, 2019

Queen Elizabeth made a lot of news yesterday with her first Instagram post. It was a letter from Charles Babbage to Prince Albert, Elizabeth's great-great-grandfather and the husband of Queen Victoria. Babbage was the first person to design a programmable computer, but he could never get it fully functional, in part because it was purely mechanical and it was extremely difficult, before mass production, to machine parts to the necessary tolerances for a contraption of the scale he envisioned. Babbage's name is associated today with that of his apprentice Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, arguably the first computer programmer.

Babbage's story has much fascinating detail, some of which the letter brings to life. Babbage was a distinguished mathematician, the holder of Isaac Newton's chair at Cambridge. His work was funded by the British government, and he kept running out of money and needing more, until finally he was cut off completely and the project died. Here is a transcription of the letter, done with the aid of a CS191 student:

Sir,

In presuming to place in your hands the accompanying volume I am actuated by a feeling beyond the mere desire of expressing my dutiful respect.

When you did me the honor of exercising the Difference Engine Your Royal Highness proved that you not only understood generally the nature of the mechanism, but also its important bearing upon human knowledge.

Having myself abstained from my publication on the subject solely because I wished to apply my whole effort to the completion of the invention, it has been my good fortune to find in a distinguished Italian Philosopher an excellent interpreter of the mathematical part of the subject, and also a Translator and Commentator whose comprehensive views have done full justice to the original.

The control of the Analytical Engine over all the great Astronomical questions on which the the safety of the Navy so much depends can scarcely fail to impart to the subject an interest in the mind of Her Majesty: that interest may perhaps be still further increased when the Queen is made acquainted with the fact that the Author of that admirable commentary is an English Peeress the daughter of the late Lord Byron.

I am Sir

With the most profound Respect

Your Royal Highness'

Most Obedient Humble Servant

C. Babbage

Dorset [unreadable suffix]

Manchester Square

15 September 1843

There is no explicit ask in the letter, but how many aspects are present here of a modern progress report to a funding agency?

"Your decision to fund my research shows how smart you are."

"It's coming along. I'm doing everything I can to finish it."

"I found someone to write the documentation, though I had to go abroad to do it."

"Remember, this work is essential to the national defense."

"Please be sure your female boss knows that I hired a woman to work on it too."

March 07, 2019

Guest post by David McCallum[Like the anonymous op-ed in the pervious post, this piece was submitted to and rejected by the Crimson, and has since been make public. It is worth noting that Professor Randall Kennedy's op-ed, which appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education and is the subject of my post "A teachable moment," was also submitted to and rejected by the Crimson.]------------------I spent 29 years in prison for a murder I didn’t commit. I was a teenager when I was put away, not much younger than many of you in college at Harvard. I was exonerated because of the work of Professor Ron Sullivan.

I am not a lawyer. I spent half of my teenage years, all of my 20’s and 30’s, and half of my 40’s in prison, so I missed that time to make a career and many other milestones of adult life I hope students in college can look forward to. I missed decades of my mother’s home-cooked food, taking care of my older sister through her deteriorating health, my friend’s marriages and childbirths and funerals, and the freedom to take a walk outside. But I do know a thing or two about the justice system. I know because I lived it. So please hear me out.

When I was 16 years old, I was questioned for a crime I didn’t commit. I was scared, confused, intimidated, and alone. I knew I was playing handball with my sister and her friends in a park near my home during the entire time this murder took place.

There was no one in the room with me, and I was questioned without a lawyer. The police said if I confessed I could go home. So I gave them their false confession. But when I asked if I could go home, I was put behind bars instead.

Things moved fast in the name of “justice”. It’s still crazy to me how few protections there were against injustice. Sure, I was asked if I wanted a lawyer. After I had already ‘confessed’. Sure, the police let my mother come see me. After I had already ‘confessed’. The system was swift in convicting me. I screamed that I didn’t do it, testified during my trial that I didn’t do it, and had lawyers appeal my conviction until all my appeals were exhausted - but it didn’t matter, because everyone with any power over my freedom at the time thought they knew the truth. It was too late.

So to prison I went. And I spent most of my life there. It wasn’t until Hurricane Carter drew attention to my case that my story started to become high profile. People started paying attention, and Professor Sullivan found me. He was helping the Brooklyn DA’s office at the time with conviction review, and I hand-wrote him a letter asking him for his help. I told him what I had been saying all along: that I was innocent. He listened.

Professor Sullivan personally pored over my file, found every hole in the prosecution’s version of events, saw that there was no valid evidence whatsoever, and he pushed the DA for my release. Professor Sullivan was never my defense attorney and he wasn’t the prosecutor either. He was a good lawyer seeking truth and justice, no matter which side of the courtroom he had to stand on to get it for me.

It takes a celebrity bringing attention to a case or to an issue, like Hurricane Carter did for me, for the holes in the criminal justice system to be exposed. When good lawyers take unpopular stands and defend people assumed to be guilty, like what I read that Professor Sullivan is doing for Harvey Weinstein, people pay attention to how the system works and take the time to dissect what’s wrong with it while he’s doing the same thing from the inside. That’s why when some lawyers called me about this resistance Professor Sullivan is experiencing for his Weinstein representation, I knew I had to respond. The image of Professor Sullivan in that courtroom when I was exonerated is seared in my memory, and I take it as a personal offense that anyone might challenge his capability to achieve justice.

Attention brings scrutiny, and scrutiny brings change. But press isn’t enough. Good lawyers are needed on both sides in order to use this attention to highlight every single problem in the system and to push for change from the inside. We can’t fix a system until we know exactly what parts are broken. When I first saw Professor Sullivan’s TED talk, I was moved to tears for that reason. He gets it, and he’s doing everything he can to identify and fix what’s broken.

I think we can also all agree that if I had someone like Professor Sullivan with me when I was on trial 35 years ago, my life would have been very different.

Innocent people deserve good lawyers from the minute they enter the system. In America, people are innocent until proven guilty. So, everyone deserves good lawyers from the start. If you believe otherwise, you would be supporting the same system that made me lose 29 years of my life to prison. A vigilante system where innocence is determined by public opinion and not evidence. I am a product of the dangers of that environment. Professor Sullivan is pulling us away from it, and I am following him as he creates the criminal justice system this country needs. I hope you will, too.

I am posting below an op-ed that was submitted to and rejected by the Crimson. The author has made it public and I am posting it here with her permission. It describes her sexual assault, and is tough reading.

----------

At the end of my first semester at Harvard, I was sexually assaulted by a classmate. He was over half a foot taller and at least 50 pounds heavier than I was. He came into my bedroom, got on top of me, and penetrated me, all within seconds. He stopped only when I told him that it hurt, and that I was a virgin. (For the career victim-shamers: both were true).He invited himself to sleep next to me that night, but I don't remember sleeping. I do remember that on the morning of my first day of 'freedom' after finals, this man's large body was on 'my' side of the bed, obstructing my clear path to the door, and I was still in vaginal pain and bleeding. I lived alone. That was the last time I lived alone.I only told two people about this incident. My best friend from my section, and Ron Sullivan.There has been a lot of talk about what Dean Sullivan may or may not say, or do, or feelings he might provoke from victims who may disclose sexual assault to him. We don't have to speculate. This situation has happened before, many times over. So if you are a woman who purports to care about other women, or a concerned male ally, and you are protesting Sullivan on the bases of these concerns, please put your picket signs down and please listen to the very real emotions of a victim who has been in the exact situation you are trying to protect me from.There were a lot of reasons that I chose to 'outcry' to Dean Sullivan, including his exceptionally kind, warm, and caring nature for which he was well-known amongst the student body. But principally, his high-profile career of successful representation of rape defendants is exactly what drew me to disclose to him. This was his world, and he knew how to rip allegations apart. I didn't have DNA evidence, no one else was around, and people saw me drinking on Mass Ave earlier that night. Did I have a case? What, if anything, could I do to preserve it? Where does formal reporting even begin? Would Harvard hold it against me in the future? What would the rest of the process look like? Was it worth it?Dean Sullivan answered these and many other questions - and he preempted even more questions I had not thought of - but first, he listened. Then, he led with comforts that this was a "judgment-free" zone; that he would never do anything with the information I gave him that I didn't explicitly want him to; that I had done nothing wrong; and he thanked me for telling him. Put simply, he validated my experience and made me feel safe, and it was in a way that screamed to me: he's done this a lot before.He asked me about evidence I would have never thought would be useful. He asked me questions about the order of events that made me realize the importance of certain details that night I was otherwise trying to forget. He tried to identify potential witnesses. He vividly and patiently walked me through the formal processes that could ensue, including AdBoard/Title IX proceedings as well as criminal prosecution. He prepared me for various potential outcomes of all of these avenues, rooted clearly in his significant experience through each of them. He emphatically encouraged me to speak to law enforcement, counselors, and Title IX staff, and he offered to represent me at any and all proceedings to the very end pro bono. He asked if he could walk me to a Title IX Dean's office himself, knowing all the while that my assailant was another one of his students. And he kept the entire conversation anchored in what I felt and what I wanted, to the extent that I knew. I had access to the premiere expert in tearing down a case in order to build mine up, and he was even better at it than I could have ever expected.And I need you to know this: he was sad. And he was angry. He is a father and a husband and when his status as a mastermind of criminal law was not at play across the table, his paternalistic protectiveness was. I can't put my finger on exactly what made me feel this way, but he made me sure that he was ready to dismantle Harvard if he needed to in order to get justice for me.He did small, conscientious things, too. We had many conversations about this incident and other related issues, and he would always call his secretary at the end of these meetings to ask the students lining up to leave because something came up - just so I wouldn't have to walk by fellow students when I left his office. He fought like hell to make sure no one knew I was a victim. And he was generous with his time. As other survivors can attest, this is not a five-minute conversation. He took great pains to make sure I never felt I was a burden or that our conversation was incomplete, and he was always there when I needed him. While I cannot disclose how my incident played out because it might identify me or my assailant, I can say confidently that Dean Sullivan could have made six to seven figures in the time he spent helping just me. Over the years, I have used the 'it's urgent' card rarely, particularly given his stature, but when I have, he is there - whether messaging me back in the middle of a class he is teaching, while seated before a judge at trial, or when standing at the gate at an airport, all just to make sure I'm okay.I am not the only one. During one of our long conversations about this incident, he got a call and asked me if I could leave his office for twenty minutes and come back. As I left, I noticed a sealed plastic evidence bag next to his feet and I saw a uniformed police officer walk into his office. When I returned, the bag was gone, and I asked why law enforcement had come to his office. He said that he was representing a victim of a gang-rape and because she was too scared to talk to the police, he was giving a detective her clothes as evidence. I later met this brave woman and she confirmed what I already knew: Dean Sullivan helped her, too. There were other times in his office where I would see on a back shelf print- outs of what appeared to be iPhone text message screenshots or on another occasion a print-out of a very long statement he seemed to be editing carefully in red pen; when I asked him what he was working on, he told me he had an AdBoard sexual assault case he was helping out with. In each of these cases, he said he was representing the victim. Not the accused. I remember, because you don't forget the joy of knowing that others are being rescued in the way that you were.Once as I was leaving his office, I asked his secretary how he has the time to take on these cases. She told me that he barely sleeps and spends most of his days on pro bono work, and that she tries to transfer email requests for pro bono representation all over the country into another folder so that he does not see them as they come in. She said she did this because she knew he was "a sucker for a sob story" and could never say no.His fights are never about himself, and I know that he will attack the hand that feeds him and starve if it means justice. He is that stubborn about being consistent and ruthless in the exercise of one's duties and giving more than lip service to these legal cornerstones. To the extent that any potential overlap arises between his duties, all I have seen him do is take the student-victim side (like mine, or these other women's), rather than the student-assailant's. Given that his private client at issue is in New York, and his Winthrop House students are in Massachusetts, and there is no evidence of any overlap between the two, I believe that Dean Sullivan is not only able to perform all of these duties with the same obstinant protectiveness: his experience qualifies him to perform them even better. I wouldn't want a Dean who will listen, nod, validate me, then walk me to the Title IX office. I want the Dean who will listen, nod, validate me, represent me as one of the best criminal defense masterminds in America who would eviscerate the arguments of anyone who challenges me, to walk to me to the Title IX office. Wouldn't you?The irony is that you will never hear from him about my story or these other countless women he has helped. Not even by reference. Not a word. His respect for confidentiality tracks attorney-client privilege, which is sacrosanct and survives death. He is, still, protecting us. The man who has rushed to so many people's defense refuses to publicize the one thing that will defend him now: that he has represented more victims in Harvard sexual assault cases than the accused, and that he has done so with a fire that makes victims like me feel no one else could have possibly come close in advocating for us. Sharing this would threaten the unconditional basis from which he helps people, which I believe is inspired by his faith and his ethics.But I think you deserve to know. And I do not recognize the man you purport to be protesting. That is not the Sullivan that I know. I revere him as a sexual assault victim - what does it say about you for telling me I should fear him?I cannot counter-protest at Harvard, nor can any of the other survivors Dean Sullivan has helped, because to do so would identify us. So, please, stop speaking for us. You are promoting the caricature of women as helpless beings without agency when you protest our ability to make choices about what we do with information about our attacks against our bodies and in whom we confide. All this does is set us back to a pre-Me Too era, in a way not unlike men making decisions about whether a woman can have an abortion or vote. I have spent much of my time since my assault advocating for other victims of sexual assault. I am confident that the current discourse, promoting overwhelming and convoluted analyses of what we should allow victims to do (premised on the idea that such decision-making power should be transferred away at all), will disincentive reporting. It is hard enough to muster the courage to disclose an incident like this without having to be concerned about whether your classmates will judge and undermine you for who you told.The only voices that should matter in the manufactured debate of whether Dean Sullivan responds to sexual assault victims appropriately are those with any sort of authority on this issue, i.e., the victims who have disclosed to him. That is it. Everyone else should see their privilege and their place and step back to make room for the victims to express whether there are any concerns with his actual handling of our allegations.So, please stop speaking for victims of sexual assault at Harvard, and do not take away our support in Dean Sullivan. You are disservicing victims and your protests do more harm than help us. You do not and will not stand for us. If you cannot see how your protests are rooted in a savior mentality and are totally obstructionist to a woman's independence of thought and agency, you do not deserve to speak on our behalf against a hero. You do not deserve Dean Sullivan.

The Cyberlaw Clinic filed an amicus curiae brief (.pdf) in the United States Supreme Court in Oracle v. Google, No. 18-956, on behalf of a group of intellectual property law scholars. The brief supported Google’s petition for certiorari, asking the Supreme Court to review decisions of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Google’s petition is the latest stage in a nearly decade-long litigation battle between Oracle and Google concerning Google’s use of Oracle’s application programming interface (“API”) in Google’s Android smartphone platform. The case raises two major sets of copyright issues. The first concerns the scope of copyright protection for APIs and the line between protectable expression and purely functional elements of computer code. The second concerns whether, if an API is protected by copyright, use of that API may fall under fair use. The Clinic’s brief supports Google on the second of those points, urging the Court to take the case and resolve the fair use issue.

By way of background, in 2010, Oracle sued Google for copyright and patent infringement. A jury in the Northern District of California reached a verdict in favor of Google on May 31, 2012. Oracle appealed the case to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which reversed the verdict and remanded for a retrial. The Federal Circuit held that the “structure, sequence and organization” of software is copyrightable. Google petitioned for a writ of certiorari, which was denied.

A second trial began in 2016 and ended with another verdict for Google — this time on the grounds that Google’s use of the Oracle API constituted fair use within the meaning of Section 107 of the Copyright Act. The Federal Circuit reversed again, this time holding that Google’s use of Oracle’s API code was not fair use.

Amici who joined the Clinic’s brief are intellectual property scholars who are concerned that the Federal Circuit’s decision below misapplied the fair use doctrine. In arguing that the Supreme Court should grant certiorari in this case, amici described at least three ways in which circuits have split in applying fair use standards. First, while several other circuits have been applying the clear error standard, the Ninth Circuit interpreted the Supreme Court’s decision in Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539 (1985) to require de novo review of fair use determinations. Second, the Supreme Court first articulated the “transformative use” test for fair use in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994), but lower courts have had trouble drawing clear lines in its application. Third, the Supreme Court never clarified the relationship between Campbell and Harper, resulting in some courts ruling that Campbell’s “transformativeness” test overruled Harper’s market-oriented test based on 17 U.S.C. § 107, while others held on to Harper’s holding, creating a circuit split in fair use applications. The brief concluded by asking the Court to grant Google’s petition for a writ of certiorari and hear the case on its merits.

Amici on the brief included:

Prof. Michael Kasdan is a partner at Wiggin and Dana LLP, and an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University School of Law;

Prof. Orly Lobel is the Don Weckstein Professor of Labor and Employment Law at University of San Diego School of Law;

Prof. Lydia Loren is the Henry J. Casey Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School;

Prof. Mark McKenna is the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School;

Prof. Lateef Mtima is a Professor of Law at Howard University School of Law;

Prof. Elizabeth L. Rosenblatt is an Associate Professor of Law at Whittier School of Law, and a Visiting Professor of Law at University of California, Davis, School of Law;

Christopher B. Seaman is an Associate Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University School of Law; and

Rebecca Tushnet is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Law School.

Many other amicus briefs supported Google’s petition for certiorari, including a brief (.pdf) filed by a separate copyright scholars coalition led by Pam Samuelson and Catherine Crump at UC Berkeley and a team from Berkeley’s Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. That brief focused on questions of copyrightability and the scope of protection for APIs.

Fall 2018 Cyberlaw Clinic students Robert Joynt and Madeline Salinas and Spring 2019 Advanced Cyberlaw Clinic students LeHeng Li and Jaisel Patel contributed to the amicus brief, working with Clinical Professor Christopher Bavitz. The Clinic team collaborated closely with Professor Rebecca Tushnet to develop the arguments in this brief.

March 05, 2019

A recent wave of worker actions at major tech firms have challenged company contracts with the Pentagon, ICE, and other government agencies; organized for safe and equitable workplaces, free from sexual harassment and discrimination; and demanded better wages, benefits, and working conditions for both white and blue collar contractors.
Scholar and a founding editor of Logic magazine Moira Weigel places these actions in context, drawing on several years of research and writing on the movement. She proposes that these actions point to the need for new frameworks for interpreting the culture or world view of the tech industry—frameworks beyond "The Californian Ideology" that has dominated since the 1990s. She shares several recently proposed alternatives for thinking about "tech work" (e.g. platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, data colonialism) that members of tech worker organizations themselves have studied and drawn on.
This talk is moderated by recent Berkman Klein Fellow, Yarden Katz.
More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-02-26/goodbye-california

Professor Jonathan Zittrain discusses the social media giant’s ‘long year’ with Facebook's head of global policy management Monika Bickert. Citing his sense of the “pessimism and near-despair that permeate our feelings about social media,” Zittrain opens the conversation by recalling a September 2017 discussion in which he and Bickert looked at the rise of white nationalism and the first indications of how social media manipulation had been at play in the 2016 elections. Since then, of course, more information about fake accounts and online attacks has come to light.
Learn more about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-12-03/state-online-speech-and-governance

March 01, 2019

Professor Randall Kennedy has an excellent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the demands that Professor Ronald Sullivan step down as faculty dean of Winthrop House. “Harvard students are outraged over Ronald Sullivan’s legal work,” reads the subtitle. “They should learn from it instead.” Kennedy here puts his finger on a particularly troubling aspect of the way this situation is unfolding.

Harvard’s first job is to educate its students. Having them in residence provides an extraordinary opportunity to teach them about the complexities of life, the ways in which human beings are multidimensional and communities of different human beings with different histories, ambitions, and ideals can cooperate and foster progress. Residential life can thereby teach a key element of democratic citizenship, so threatened today: how to engage in a spirit of civic optimism with people whose decisions and actions you find disagreeable.

So far that sounds like a standard justification for diversity, with which no one could disagree. But the next step is where the rubber meets the road. A society in which each member plays multiple roles, and in which those constellations of personae differ from individual to individual, can hold together peacefully and productively only through the exercise of reason applied to deep but sometimes competing commitments to individual freedom and to the common good. Such a commitment requires both sublimation of one’s own emotions and empathy toward others. It is inconsistent with a view that discord is intolerable and personal comfort is supreme. As Kennedy says,

Those calling for Sullivan’s resignation or dismissal as a faculty dean … are displaying an array of disturbingly widespread tendencies. One is impatience with drawing essential distinctions such as that between a lawyer and his client. Another is a willingness to minimize or dispense with important safeguards like fair trials. Yet another is a tendency to resort to demonization.

The public response of Harvard officials thus far has been to draw a sharp divide between Sullivan’s educational and pastoral roles, seemingly restricting “education” to book-learning. According to the Crimson,

“When we think about the faculty dean role, part of it is the faculty dean as an educator, someone that’s helping to connect students to, frankly, the excitement of intellectual and academic life,” [FAS Dean Claudine] Gay said. “But there’s also a pastoral role, sort of an expectation of a special responsibility to the well-being of the students who are part of the community.”

On that score, Dean Gay found Sullivan’s handling of the controversy “insufficient.” Dean Khurana echoed those sentiments, while coldly defending Sullivan’s “academic freedom.” I am not at all sure that is the right category; does Dean Khurana mean to suggest that rights to academic freedom end at the gates of the Harvard Houses, lest someone do or say something that offends other residents?

Dean Khurana then charged former Freshman Dean Tom Dingman to conduct a “Climate Review” of Winthrop House. Having more or less publicly thrown Sullivan under the bus, that is, Khurana has asked Dingman to find out how students are feeling and apparently plans to hold Sullivan to a spookily vague climatological standard. (Dingman is a loyal servant of Harvard and an old friend, but he is also the dean who, invoking the same troubling dichotomy between intellect and feelings, asked students for a public pledge of their commitment to the principle that “kindness holds a place on a par with intellectual attainment.”)

I suspect that it is very hard for Sullivan to speak up for himself in the way that Kennedy has supported him and indeed has supported Harvard’s full educational role. Sullivan is in a more ethically constrained situation than the nurse I mentioned in an earlier post. A medical professional can say what she wants about the patient she is treating as long as she treats him and respects his medical privacy. But Sullivan, having agreed to defend Weinstein, can speak about him only in the voice of his lawyer.

Yet there is no reason why Harvard—Khurana, or Gay, or President Bacow, or a student group, or some department, or the Safra Center, or some other Harvard entity—could not stage a thoughtful educational forum to explore this nuanced situation. I am thinking of the sort of thing the Harvard Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society sponsored about single-gender organizations, though it would not have to be framed as a debate. In the absence of any effort to raise the discussion to a more rational level, an important teachable moment will be lost. “We can only hope,” as Kennedy concludes, “that Harvard authorities will decline to defer to expressions of noisy discomfort and instead adhere to those intellectual and moral tenets that sometimes must bear the uncomfortable burden of complexity.”

February 27, 2019

The College’s Committee on Student Life is considering an audit of “comp” processes — membership training or vetting exercises for student organizations — to eliminate requirements which some committee members believe are “detrimental to campus culture,” according to several attendees of the Feb. 14 committee meeting. (Harvard Crimson)

Does no one hear how creepy this sounds?

In the Church of Scientology, auditing is a process wherein the auditor takes an individual, known as a "preclear", through times in their life and gets rid of any hold negative situations have on them. … Auditing is considered "a technical measure," that according to the Church, "lifts the burdened individual, the 'preclear,' from a level of spiritual distress to a level of insight and inner self-realization." The process is meant to bring the individual to clear status. (Wikipedia, "Auditing – Scientology")

February 26, 2019

Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services.
In "The Smart Enough City," Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself.
More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-02-19/smart-enough-city

After two decades of little direct legislation of the internet, national laws and related court decisions meant to govern cyberspace are rapidly proliferating worldwide. They are becoming building blocks in new legal frameworks that will shape the evolution of Internet governance and policymaking for years to come.
In the Global South and particularly under repressive regimes, these frameworks can be imposed with little regard for human rights obligations and without a full understanding of the technologies and processes they regulate or their implications for the preservation of the core values of the internet: interoperability, universality, and free expression and the free flow of information.
In this panel, practitioners from five international organizations monitoring the development of legislation and case law related to cyberspace discuss the implications for the future of human rights online.
Moderator: Robert Faris
Panelists: Dr. Hawley Johnson (Project Manager for Columbia Global Freedom of Expression), Robert Muthuri (Research Fellow – ICT at the Centre for IP and IT at the Strathmore School of Law), Juan Carlos Lara (manager of the Public Policy and Research team at Derechos Digitales), Gayatri Khandhadai (lawyer with a background in international law and human rights, international and regional human rights mechanisms, research, and advocacy), and Jessica Dheere (co-founder of the Beirut–based digital rights research, training, and advocacy organization SMEX (smex.org) and a 2018-19 research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center.
More about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-01-31/cyberlaw-and-human-rights

February 19, 2019

Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe has a hilarious column on the Winthrop House story. John Adams defended British soldiers who opened fire on American rebels. Should he have lost his Harvard library privileges?

It is never a good idea to read the comments on newspaper pieces, but I couldn't resist. Leaving the trolls aside, it's amazing how self-righteous and humorless some of them are. Weinstein, as one comment and many previous opinions have argued, is entitled to a lawyer. But anybody could have defended him, so Sullivan should have turned him down. But the whole point of the column was to force the question of whether Adams should have turned down the British soldiers. I have never heard it said that he was the only one who would take them on.

At the same time, a new task force has been announced, the Working Group on Symbols and Spaces at Harvard College, to be chaired by the estimable Professor Ali Asani. The interview is quite abstract, so it is hard to tell where this project is going. There is a nice reminder of the importance of the randomization of the Houses that occurred almost 25 years ago, pursuant to a recommendation of a faculty committee I co-chaired. In part the discourse seems to be about re-asserting the mission of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations; its future has been somewhat in doubt since the death of its remarkable founding director, Allen Counter. So that is all to the good too.

And I wonder how far this example goes:

It is natural for these students who are discovering facets of their ethnic, religious, cultural, and racial identity as part of the College experience to want to explore those facets within affinity groups.

Was gender intentionally omitted from that list, lest it suggest that women should not be punished for getting together with other women off-campus? On the other hand, the interview goes on to say,

We see people are retreating into their own communities, engaging only with people like themselves. We can see such tendencies on campus. For example, the central concern regarding final clubs were policies that led to certain students excluding other students from their social networks, determining who belonged and who did not.

This sounds to me like another revision of the history, or at least a very different emphasis on a matter for which the University has offered a variety of explanations. The trouble with this argument -- that the decision was about social exclusivity, as opposed to the idea that it was all about either sexual assault or gender exclusion -- is that no one ever showed any data documenting what the ethnic or social demography of the Final Clubs was today. At best, the University would from time to time fall back, without evidence, on the implication that they were all full of Hornblowers and Wigglesworths as they allegedly were in the nineteenth century, just hiding places for those damned Puritans we excised from Fair Harvard. I am pretty sure that is not what they look like today. And of course, the sororities were never socially exclusive, so if that is the revisionist argument, maybe the committee can rethink the decision.

In the worst case, the committee will spend its time on the discomfort students are said to experience because of the presence at Harvard of buildings with objectionable names, or speakers with objectionable views or histories. If that is where the committee chooses to go, Cullen has given it quite a list of cases to consider. Is it time to rename Stoughton Hall? After all, who would want to live in a building named in honor of the judge who cruelly sent the innocent Salem "witches" to their graves?

February 14, 2019

Should Ronald Sullivan limit his pastoral care of students to good people?

That is the question raised by the attacks to which he has been subjected on the basis that he has professional relationships with bad people, such as Harvey Weinstein and Roland Fryer. Sullivan explained himself pretty well on this, I think; the American system of the rule of law demands that even bad people be given the benefit of due process and competent legal defense. Rights, once taken away from unpopular figures, are more easily compromised for the rest of us.

Yes, goes the retort, Weinstein and Fryer have a right to counsel. But that doesn’t mean that Sullivan has to defend them. They can instead hire someone who doesn’t have pastoral responsibility for students in Winthrop House.

But then shouldn’t Sullivan also be limiting his pastoral care of students to just the good people in the House? After all, Houses are full of people involved in peer disputes in which one of the parties must have done something wrong, and also people holding political and social views which most members of the House consider indefensible. Heavens, Winthrop House may even have a few sorority members in its population, and we KNOW that those people are, in President Faust’s words, out of step with Harvard’s “deepest values.”

Is it a faculty dean’s responsibility to pick and choose the good people among those in the House, and let someone else provide support to the others? Does the dean dishonor himself and undermine the House community by providing a sympathetic ear to a student who is accused of serious wrongdoing, or who simply holds views other students find offensive (say, those of the Republican party or the Roman Catholic church)?

And if it is OK for a faculty dean to support unpopular people within the House, why should Sullivan’s outside professional connections have to be limited to people meeting a majoritarian morality test?

Several faculty deans are physicians. If Weinstein had cancer, would we want these deans to treat him? There are plenty of doctors in the world, after all. Why should deans who provide pastoral care to Harvard students taint themselves by helping keep hated people alive?

Because that is the ethical requirement of their profession. The trauma doctors and nurses who treated Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Marathon bomber, celebrated when they saw he had been captured, and then, exhausted though they were from days of caring for his victims, did everything in their power to keep him alive.

Of course, this entire train of logic is ill-founded. Professionals are not human extensions of the people they serve. They fill professional roles that may have nothing to do with their personal values. Their moral obligation is not to withhold their services from bad people; if anything, their professional responsibility is to provide those services.

Sullivan explained this. But the logic of his detractors fails for a second reason.

What makes all these questions not just ill-founded but absurd is the presumption that it can be determined in advance who is good and who is bad, so the deans could withhold their succor from the bad. The point of housing a diversity of students under one roof is precisely to get them all past their Manichean systems of prejudicial classification. Students are housed together so that they will learn to withhold judgment, to listen empathetically, and to refrain from formulaic judgments. When President Lowell created the House system, having insisted that “each House should be as nearly as possible a cross-section of the College,” he explained why:

The problem of the college is a moral one, deepening the desire to develop one’s own mind, body and character; and this is much promoted by living in surroundings and an atmosphere congenial to that object. … The Houses are a social device for a moral purpose.”

I am startled that deans Gay, Khurana, and Eck have joined the chorus of Sullivan’s public critics; I don’t recall anything like that happening before. This is starting to feel a lot like the sorry situation of the Christakises at Yale.

Almost three years ago, I wrote to dean Khurana to express my concern that by attacking nonconformists (members of single gender clubs, in that case), he was “passing from creating community to molding a monoculture, in which people of whom we have every reason to be proud are afraid to do or say things that are lawful and generally considered harmless.”

Sullivan, too, is a nonconformist. Not many others at Harvard are speaking up for the rights of Weinstein and Fryer. Maybe there is more to Sullivan’s story than I know. But on the basis of the public statements of Harvard officials, I am even more worried today about their determination to create a monoculture here.

February 13, 2019

If I were writing my mega-essay on reggaeton today, I’d want to make a lot more space for the Dominican Republic’s local take on the genre.

And that has only gotten truer in the 8 years since, as Dominican dembow has continued to grow, change, and gather steam, including outside of the DR. So I was thrilled that People en Español’s CHICA decided to devote so much space to the genre last month. Jennifer Mota has written the definitive piece on the genre, and while I did provide some quotes and Jenny generously cites my research, it’s a piece that I would recommend whether or not you’re a W&W fan.

Among other things, the article is careful to place Dominican dembow in the longer transnational story of reggaeton, from Jamaica to Panama, New York to Puerto Rico, while also showing how the genre has taken a distinct path from its Puerto Rican cousin. Indeed, while I had long understood dembow as a direct DR response to Playero’s and The Noise’s seminal (proto-reggaeton) mixtapes, Mota shows that Dominican producers such as DJ Boyo had been concocting their own mixed up, hyped up version of Jamaican dancehall since 1993!

In addition to showing how dembow has developed according to a distinct Dominican aesthetic, Mota also attends to critical questions of colorism, gender, and the importance of dance, including the importance of collective/solo “display” dances (i.e., not perreo) — and how such street dance videos on YouTube have been a major vector in the genre’s increasing popularity and reach.

Of course, there’s a reason one might get the space for an article like this at this particular moment in time (though even then, this is of remarkable depth and substance): dembow is hot. The genre appears on the verge of a mainstream breakthrough, especially via the popularity of El Alfa, whose high profile collaborations with Bad Bunny and Cardi B have helped bring as much recognition to the genre as it perhaps has ever seen.

One of the things that has always appealed to me about Dominican dembow is its intensity and weirdness: the density of samples, the rapid tempos, the rough, repetitive refrains. Dominican producers seemed content to pitch their music to Dominican tastes, raised on breakneck merengue, and — like Dutch bubbling — this made the music, by some measures, quite strange to outside ears and perhaps so esoteric as to resist further popularization, never mind appropriation.

That may yet remain the case for Dominican dembow. As the article notes at the outset, El Alfa has yet to push the dembow side of his sound into the mainstream. His collaboration with Cardi B tends toward conventional reggaeton / “tropical pop” and avoids the bracing tempos (except, of course, in his flow) and jarring arrangements of dembow. Framing the question in the article is a telling quote from Chael Produciendo, producer of “Mi Mami,” the collabo with Cardi–

“We understood that to hit the [mainstream] public with it out of nowhere could be overbearing so what we did was create a more pop-influenced beat so that it can touch other waters and later introduce the sound.”

El Alfa’s work with Bad Bunny gets us closer to what mainstream dembow might sound like: “Dame Ga Ge Gi Go Gu” is relentless and noisy, and the beat switch in “La Romana” — notably, moving the song away from bachata-infused trap — gets us pretty close to a dembow sound less invested in the same cherished samples but still drawing broadly on the aesthetic that emerged from such samples being potent vehicles for familiarity and innovation. In some sense, this is not unlike what (Dominican) producers Luny Tunes did to change the sound of reggaeton, redirecting the genre toward the plasticity of synths and “Latin” musical signs while still nodding subtly to the sample-based aesthetic that gave rise to the genre. (Keep your ears on the snares ;)

Whether Dominican dembow’s future parallels reggaeton’s remarkable path to mainstream success and influence remains to be seen, though I agree with the author that 2019 may be the year we find out. If Dominican dembow does take off beyond the DR, Washington Heights, and certain corners of YouTube, this article will provide an excellent guide as to why, when, and how.

Since the report says (under Innovation, on page 73) we need to “use technology to enhance journalism’s roles in fostering democracy,” and that “news companies need to embrace technology to support their mission and achieve sustainability,” it should help to bring up the innovation we proposed in an application for a Knight News Challenge grant in 2011. This innovation was, and still is, called EmanciPay. It’s a citizen-sovereign way to pay for news, plus all forms of creative production where there is both demand and failing or absent sources of funding.

Under the final text, any online community, platform or service that has existed for three or more years, or is making €10,000,001/year or more, is responsible for ensuring that no user ever posts anything that infringes copyright, even momentarily. This is impossible, and the closest any service can come to it is spending hundreds of millions of euros to develop automated copyright filters. Those filters will subject all communications of every European to interception and arbitrary censorship if a black-box algorithm decides their text, pictures, sounds or videos are a match for a known copyrighted work. They are a gift to fraudsters and criminals, to say nothing of censors, both government and private.

There are much better ways of getting the supply and demand sides of creative markets together. EmanciPay is one of them, and deserves another airing.

Perhaps now that Knight and Aspen are cheering the citizen-sovereign bandwagon, it’s worth open-sourcing our original EmanciPay proposal.

So here it is, copied and pasted out of the last draft before we submitted it. Since much has changed since then (other than the original idea, which is the same as ever only more timely), I’ve added a bunch of notes at the end, and a call for action. Before reading it, please note two things: 1) we are not asking for money now (we were then, but not now); and 2) while this proposal addresses the challenge of paying for news, it applies much more broadly to all creative work.

10:00pm Monday 31 January 2011

Project Title:

EmanciPay: a user-driven system for generating revenue and managing relationships

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge

$325,000

Describe your project:

EmanciPay is the first user-driven payment system for news and information media. It is also the first system by which the consumers of media can create and participate in relationships with media — and the first system to reform the legal means by which those relationships are created and sustained.

With EmanciPay, users can easily choose to pay whatever they like, whenever they like, however they like — on their own terms and not just those controlled by the media’s supply side. EmanciPay will also provide means for building genuine two-way relationships, rather than relationships defined by each organization’s subscription and membership systems. As with Creative Commons, terms will be expressed in text and symbols that can be read easily by both software and people.

While there is no limit to payment choice options with EmanciPay, we plan to test these one at a time. The first planned trials are with Tipsy, which is being developed in alongside EmanciPay, and which also has a Knight News Challenge application. The two efforts are cooperative and coordinated.

How will your project improve the delivery of news and information to geographic communities?:

Two ways.

First is with a new business model. Incumbent local and regional media currently have three business models: paid delivery (subscriptions and newsstand sales), advertising, and (in the case of noncommercial media) appeals for support. All of these have well-known problems and limitations. They are also controlled in a top-down way by media organizations. By reducing friction and lowering the threshold of payment, EmanciPay will raise the number of customers while also providing direct and useful intelligence about the size and nature of demand. This supports geographic customisation of news and information goods.

Second is by providing ways for both individuals and news organizations to create and sustain relationships that go beyond “membership” (which in too many cases means little more than “we gave money”). EmanciPay will also help consumers of news participate in the news development process. Because EmanciPay is based on open source code and open standards, it can be widely adopted and adapted to meet local needs. CRM (customer relationship management) software companies, many of which supply CRM systems to media organizations, are also awaiting VRM developments. (The cover and much of this CRM Magazine are devoted to VRM.)

What unmet need does your proposal answer?:

EmanciPay meets the need for maximum freedom and flexibility in paying for news and information, and for a media business model that does not depend only on advertising, membership systems, large donors or government grants. (This last one is of special interest at a time when cutting government funding of public broadcasting is a campaign pledge by many freshly elected members of Congress.)

Right now most news and information is free of charge on the Web, even when the same goods are sold on newsstands or through cable TV subscriptions. This fact, plus cumbersome and widely varied membership, pledging and payment systems, serves to discourage payment by media users. Even the membership systems of public broadcasting stations exclude vast numbers of people who would contribute “if it was easy”. EmanciPay overcomes these problems by making it easy for consumers of news to become customers of news. It also allows users to initiate real and productive relationships with news organizations, whether or not they pay those organizations.

How is your idea new?:

Equipping individuals with their own tools for choosing what and how to pay, and for creating and maintaining relationships, is a new idea. Nearly all other sustainability ideas involve creating new intermediators or working on improving services on the supply side.

Tying sustainability to meaningful relationships (rather than just “membership” is also new). So is creating means by which individuals can assert their own “terms of service” — and match those terms with those on the supply side.

EmanciPay is also new in the scope of its ambition. Beyond creating a large new source of revenues, and scaffolding meaningful relationships between supply and demand, EmanciPay intends to remove legal frictions from the marketplace as well. What lawyers call contracts of adhesion (ones in which the dominant party is free to change what they please while the submissive party is nailed to whatever the dominant party dictates) have been pro forma on the Web since the invention of the cookie in 1995. EmanciPay is the first and only system intended to obsolete and replace these onerous “agreements” (which really aren’t).

Once in place and working, EmanciPay’s effects should exceed even those of Creative Commons, because EmanciPay addresses the demand as well as the supply side of the marketplace. And, like Creative Commons, EmanciPay does not require changes in standing law.

Finally, EmanciPay is new in the sense that it is not centralized, and does not require an intermediary. As with email (the protocols of which are open and decentralized, by design), EmanciPay supports both self-hosting and hosting in “the cloud.” It is also both low-level and flexible enough to provide base-level building material for any number of new businesses and services.

What will you have changed by the end of the project?:

First, we will have changed the habits and methods by which people pay for the media goods they receive, starting with news and information.

Second, we will have introduced relationship systems that are not controlled by the media, but driven instead by the individuals who are each at the centers of their own relationships with many different entities. Thus relationships will be user-driven and not just organization-driven.

Third, we will have created a new legal framework for agreements between buyers and sellers on the Web and in the networked world, eliminating many of the legal frictions involved in today’s e-commerce systems.

Fourth, we will have introduced to the world an intention economy, based on the actual intentions of buyers, rather than on guesswork by sellers about what customers might buy. (The latter is the familiar “attention economy” of advertising and promotion.)

As Senior Editor of Linux Journal, I’ve been covering open source code development since 1996, contributing to its understanding and widespread adoption. For that and related work, I received a Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award for “Best Communicator” in 2005.

I helped popularize blogging, a subject to which I have been contributing original thinking and writing since 1999. I also have more than 12,000 followers on Twitter.

EmanciPay is also my idea, and one I have been working on for some time. This includes collaboration with PRX and other members of the public radio community on ListenLog (the brainchild of Keith Hopper at NPR), which can be found today on the Public Radio Player, an iPhone app that has been downloaded more than 2 million times. I am also working on EmanciPay with students at MIT/CSAIL and Kings College London. The MIT/CSAIL collaboration is led by David Karger of the MIT faculty, and ties in with work he and students are doing with Haystack and Tipsy.

I’ve also contributed to other VRM development efforts — on identity and trust frameworks, on privacy assurance, on selective disclosure of personal data, and on personal data stores (PDSes), all of which will help support EmanciPay as it is deployed.

What terms best describe your project?:

Bold, original, practical, innovative and likely to succeed.

What tasks/benchmarks need to be accomplished to develop your project and by when will you complete them? (500 words)

1) Engaging of programmers at MIT and other institutions within two months.

2) Establishment of Customer Commons (similar to Creative Commons) within two months.

3) Getting EmanciPay into clinical law case study by classes at law schools, one semester after the grant money arrives.

6) Relationships established with PayPal, Google Checkout and other payment intermediators within six months.

7) Tipsy trials within three months after beta-level code is ready.

8) Full EmanciPay trials within six months after beta-level code is ready.

9) Research protocols completed by the time beta code is ready.

How will you measure progress?: (500 words)

1) Involvement in open source code development by programmers other than those already paid or engaged (for example, as students) for the work

2) Completion of code

3) Deployment in target software and devices

4) Cooperation by allied development .orgs and .coms

5) Adoption and use by individuals

6) Direct financial benefit for news organizations.

All are measurable. We can count programmers working on code bases, as well as patches and lines of code submitted and added. We can see completed code in downloadable and installable form in the appropriate places. We can see and document cooperation by organizations. We can count downloads and monitor activities by users (with their permission). And we can see measurable financial benefits to news and information organizations. Researching each of these will be part of the project. For example, we will need to provide on our website, or directly, descriptions of accounting methods for the organizations that will benefit directly from individual contributions.

Do you see any risk in the development of your project?: (500 words)

EmanciPay is likely to be seen as disruptive by organizations that are highly vested in existing forms of funding. One example is public broadcasting, which has relied on fund drives for decades.

There is also a fear that EmanciPay will raise the number of contributors while lowering the overall funding dollar amount spent by contributors. I don’t expect that to happen. What I do expect is for the market to decide — and for EmanciPay to provide the means. Fortunately, EmanciPay also provides means for non-monetary relationships to grow as well, which will raise the perception of value by users and customers, and the likelihood that more users will become customers.

How will people learn about what you are doing?: (500 words) remaining

We will blog about it, talk about it at conferences, tweet about it, and use every other personal and social medium to spread the word. And we will use traditional media relations as well — which shouldn’t be too hard, since we will be working to bring more income to those media.

We have a good story about an important cause. I’m good at communicating and driving stories forward, and I and have no doubt that the effort will succeed.

Is this a one-time experiment or do you think it will continue after the grant?: (500 words)

EmanciPay will continue after the grant because it will become institutionalized within the fabric of the economy, as will its allied efforts.

In addition to the Knight News Challenge, does your project rely on other revenue sources? (Choose all that apply):

Customer Commons was incorporated as a California-based 501(3)(c) nonprofit shortly after this was submitted. (It is also currently cited in this CNN story and this one by Fox News.) Almost entirely bootstrapped, Customer Commons has established itself as a Creative Commons-like place where model personal privacy policies and terms of engagement that individuals proffer as first parties can live. Those terms are among a number of other tools for exercising citizen sovereign powers. “CuCo” also plans, immodestly, to be a worldwide membership organization, comprised entirely of customers (possible slogan: “We’re the hundred percent”). In that capacity, it will hold events, publish, develop customer-side code that’s good for both customers and businesses (e.g. a shopping cart of your own that you can take from site to site), and lobby for policies that respect the natural sovereignty and power of customers in the digital world. After years of prep, and not much asking, Customer Commons is at last ready to accept funding, and to start scaling up. If you have money to invest in grass roots citizen-sovereign work, that’s a good place to do it.

Commercial publishers, including nearly all the world’s websites (or so it seems) became deeply dependent on adtech—tracking based advertising—for income. (I reviewed that history here in 2015.) We’ve been fighting that. So have governments. Both the GDPR in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act were called to existence by privacy abuses funded by adtech. (Seriously, without adtech, those laws wouldn’t have happened.)

I am now editor-in-chief of Linux Journal, the first publication ready to accept terms proffered by readers, starting with a Customer Commons one dubbed #NoStalking.

That list could go on, but it’s not what matters.

What matters is that EmanciPay was a great idea when we proposed it in the first place, and a better idea now. With the right backing, it can scale.

If you want to solve the problem of paying for news (or all of journalism), there is not a more democratic, fair, trust-causing and potentially massive idea on the table, for doing exactly that, than EmanciPay. Nor one better potentiated to address lots of other problems and goals laid out in that Knight Commission report. One example: An immodest proposal for the music industry.

February 04, 2019

As the Cyberlaw Clinic has continued to deepen its practice in AI-generated art (and as AI art has increasingly cropped up in the news), it’s become clear that developers and artists are looking for guidance on how to handle rights in these new works. Clinical Instructors Jessica Fjeld and Mason Kortz have previously written about how to conceptualize the anatomy of AI art for rights purposes; translating that theory into practice was an obvious next step, and today marks the release of a new set of templates created with input from Sarah Schwettmann and SJ Klein of MIT.

We’ve launched the template project with agreements for the two most common situations:

A license template, for when someone undertaking an AI art project wants to use existing works of art (music, visual art, writing, etc.) as inputs for their system, for example as training data

A collaboration agreement template, for when two or more people are working together to build, train, and run an AI art system

The templates are accompanied by a how-to guide, which explains the choices that the template authors made in drafting the agreements, and what additional information users will need to provide.

While AI art projects often produce cutting-edge, boundary-blurring results, the community that produces them is collaborative and interdependent. For this reason, the templates encourage (but do not require) parties participating in the creation of these works to open-source their outputs, under Creative Commons or comparable licenses.

The licenses are themselves released under a CC0 public domain dedication, and we hope users will iterate on them and share useful changes back with the community through Github.

January 28, 2019

The Cyberlaw Clinic filed an amicus brief (pdf) last week in the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on behalf of a group of former United States Magistrate Judges, supporting the unsealing of government surveillance orders and applications. The brief supports Jason Leopold, a BuzzFeed News journalist, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (“RCFP”). The appeal arises out of a petition that Leopold filed in the D.C. District Court to unseal applications and orders for pen registers, trap and trace devices, tracking devices, stored email, and other types of surveillance, many of which remain sealed indefinitely in practice. He argued that, once the seal is no longer necessary, public access to these judicial records is required under the First Amendment and common law right of access to court records. Leopold was later joined by RCFP.

The parties originally worked with the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia to narrow the scope of the request, but although some information was turned over, the majority of the applications and orders remained sealed. On February 26, 2018, the district court denied petitioners access to any additional old surveillance matters and granted only very limited access to surveillance applications and orders going forward. The court based its decision largely on the administrative burden the full request would place on the government.

Leopold and RCFP have appealed the district court decision to the D.C. Circuit, asking for the court to grant access to the records under the First Amendment and the common law right of access to judicial records. Although the lower court decision is specific to the context of the D.C. district, Leopold’s case has the potential to shape how federal courts generally handle requests for information regarding government surveillance practices.

Amici are all former United States magistrate judges with a shared interest in unsealing federal surveillance orders and a diverse set of experiences on and off the bench:

Judge Mildred Methvin has served as judge in Louisiana, Maryland, and Pennsylvania and is a former AUSA. She is currently an attorney and mediator in Louisiana.

Judge Brian Owsley has served as a judge in Texas and is a former trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. He is currently an assistant professor of law at University of North Texas at Dallas College of Law.

Judge Viktor Pohorelsky served as a judge in New York. Prior to his judicial appointment, he had a fourteen-year career as a litigator in private practice and as an AUSA.

Judge Stephen Smith served as a judge in Texas and is the current director of the Fourth Amendment & Open Courts program at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

Judge David Waxse served as a judge in Kansas and is the former President of the Kansas Bar Association and former Chair of the Kansas Commission on Judicial Qualifications.

Based on their more than 90 years of collective experience on the bench, amici explain the practical consequences of unsealing surveillance matters. Amici outline the process of unsealing surveillance applications and orders in their courtrooms and discuss places where the administrative burden can be reduced, including the shift to e-filing of sealed surveillance applications and orders.

Amici further explain why the burdens of unsealing are not as dire as the district court predicted: surveillance filings can be easily redacted, the majority of unsealings of old surveillance matters proceed unopposed, and properly redacted surveillance documents present no real risk to law enforcement practices. Amici also explain the downsides of considering government inconvenience when determining whether the public should have access to surveillance orders. As administrative practices vary greatly across judges and across government offices, taking the administrative burden into account would effectively make the common law right depend on the size, efficiency, and workload of the government office who made the request or the judge who received it.

The Cyberlaw Clinic is honored to have represented such august amici and hopes the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will seriously consider their input. Fall 2018 Cyberlaw Clinic student Akua Abu helped develop arguments for the brief, and the brief was written by Winter 2019 student Alexandra Noonan with assistance from Clinical Fellow Kendra Albert and Clinical Instructor Mason Kortz.

January 16, 2019

Harvard's policy against single-sex clubs is not working, writes Emma Duncan. of the Economist (behind a paywall). It's a good short summary of the way the logic of the sanctions has gotten twisted and missed its target. I'm quoted, speaking sympathetically on behalf of the many women in CS who were members of women's clubs, and also pointing out the strange political alliances this issue has created, on both sides.

One unnamed former Harvard administrator, no fan of the final clubs, notes, “If we’d happily write letters for people who were members of the Communist Party or the NRA, it seems lunacy to say that we’d refuse that to somebody who wanted to join one of these clubs.” The Communist Party example is a reminder that Joseph McCarthy went after a Harvard professor (Wendell Furry) for having been a member of the Party, and President Pusey stuck up for his right to continue teaching without any dishonor at Harvard.

I really do wonder about the status of theHarvard Knights of Columbusand theHarvard Daughters of Isabella. These groups are not only single-sex and composed exclusively of Harvard students---they use the Harvard name, something that none of the blacklisted clubs do. We were repeatedly told that the fact that the USGSOs were off campus and private was a minor technicality, since they were so dependent on Harvard's good name. Well, these organizations are even more closely tied to Harvard---and operate under the control of a national or even international mother organization, another black mark against the fraternities and sororities. I asked about these organizations in a faculty meeting, and got no clear answer. On what basis are their members not subject to sanction? (To be clear, I am only pointing out how twisted the logic has gotten, not calling on Harvard to take on our good neighbors at St. Paul's!)

January 13, 2019

If you’re a frequent traveler, you probably have needed a visa expediter at some point. Good expediters can get you out of a serious jam, helping you get a visa or even a new passport in a short time. For over a decade, I used A. Briggs, a long-established expediter used by many large firms and institutions. They once helped me get a Nigerian visa and a new passport in under a week, which was pretty amazing.

But they’ve gone downhill. Way down. I’m enroute to Nairobi today and from there to Sierra Leone, and given some tight timing, I sent my paperwork to A. Briggs to get the Sierra Leone visa. I should have backed off once I noticed some significant changes to their website. They have been acquired by another firm, CIBT, and their application process is now loaded with hidden fees. By default, you’re signed up for a number of expensive extras, including a $25 fee for keeping a digital copy of the visa they obtain and $25 for registering you with the US State Department, a service the US government provides for free. The online process heavily upsells their “concierge service”, which promises handholding through the visa process for a mere $300 extra – in retrospect, I wonder whether my dreadful experience would have been better or worse after paying that extortionate fee.

People use visa expediters because they need a visa in a narrow window of time – you’re basically paying someone to carry your paperwork to the consulate, wait for it to be completed and send it back to you. The most critical piece of the application is the time by which you need the visa, which in my case was Friday, as my flight to Kenya left Saturday at noon. I spoke to Briggs several times through the process, as they needed even more documents for Sierra Leone than expected, and they assured me they’d have the visa by Wednesday to send it to me on Thursday. When I didn’t get word from a courier that it was enroute on Thursday, I called. Turned out they had gotten the wrong visa – a tourist visa instead of the much more expensive, multiple entry business visa I’d asked for. Instead of calling me and giving mr the choice of traveling with the tourist visa – which I would have chosen – they sent the passport back to the embassy. This meant I wouldn’t have the visa until Friday, and there was no way to get it before getting on my plane.

I got on the phone and got to a manager at Briggs who offered me the solution of a same day courier to deliver me the visa… for a mere $729. When I explained that this was their mistake not mine, she offered to have a courier meet me at the airport just before my flight, for only $200, which she rapidly reduced to $80. (It’s not clear what I might have been able to bargain the $700+ courier down to, but it strongly suggests that A. Briggs is marking up the cost of courier services as another revenue stream.)

I scheduled delivery of my passport to JFK for 10am the day of my flight, which left at noon. Tight but doable. The person I worked with gave me several numbers to try if there were any problems. Predictably, there were. When no courier contacted me by 10am, I started calling numbers. All went to voicemail boxes which hadn’t been set up, except one the woman had given me as her business cellphone, which went to a very confused woman in DC who had nothing to do with the company. Even though no one at A. Briggs or their parent company answered their phones, fortunately their courier did… who explained that A. Briggs had requested delivery at 11am, the time the flight would be closing. I begged the courier to come as fast as he could, tipped him generously when he made it by 10:40 and made my flight with a few seconds to spare.

So yes, I got the visa. I also vomited twice from stress, first when I discovered they’d resubmitted the passport, creating the crisis, and again when I discovered the courier wasn’t coming. Oh, and for such thoughtful service, A. Briggs charged me over $400 in handling fees on top of the $160 visa fee.

Don’t use them, or any company that’s part of CIBT. They won’t give you direct phone numbers to talk with whoever is processing your visa unless you pay an absurd extra fee. Their phone system is misconfigured, so if you’re in a jam, trying to reach someone, you’ll be sent to a broken voicemail inbox. I have no way of knowing whether my miserable experience was incompetence, or a new business strategy – I suspect the former – but I am now trying to get MIT to stop using A. Briggs as their visa expediter, and I would urge anyone, an individual or a corporate travel department, to find someone else to work with.

(Fun postscript – once I finally got my visa, I expected to see a cancelled tourist visa as well as a business visa. I didn’t – just a clean business visa. Given that there’s no pages missing from my passport, and no alterations to that visa page, it looks like A. Briggs just… lied. Either they got the visa on time and failed to send it to me in time, or they didn’t get it until a day late… or maybe they simply didn’t send it on time so they could charge fees on top of what they paid a courier to deliver it. Please, please don’t use this company’s services.)

January 12, 2019

Redundancy has a bad name. Already in antiquity redundantia implied excess: literally, the superabundance of a resource (such as water); figuratively, an overflowing stream of words as in the Ciceronian “illa pro Roscio juvenilis redundantia” (Or. 30: 108). In the era of industry and post-industry, the word retains a ring of inefficiency. If something is redundant, by definition, it is something to be trimmed, something that is misaligned with history’s headlong rush into the future. The issue is not just efficiency, it’s also cost (duplication), balance (to have redundant elements is to overweight one facet of an argument at the expense of others), distraction (the overly weighted attracts disproportionate attention).

But whether in the domain of discourse, education, science or engineering, there is no safety, success, or sustainability without redundancy. Reliance upon a single system, line of argumentation, or approach amounts to putting your eggs in a single basket. This may work well enough in simple, highly constrained universes, whether social or mechanical, but not when it comes to grappling with complexity, noise, interference, or uncertainties of the world, not to mention nature.

Redundancy implies the presence of a backup, an additional channel, a fallback option, a support, embedded and intertwined structures. When an alpha option fails, a beta fallback quickly loses any taint of extraneousness. It ensures resilience. And resilience, understood both as elasticity and the ability to recover, is essential to the success of all social systems and life forms. Redundancy informs the fractal structures of the natural world, allowing for flexibility and adaptability. It drives processes of teaching and learning.

Late in her unfairly maligned Dark Age Ahead (2004), the great urban historian Jane Jacobs makes this very point with respect to education:

Nurturing and instructing human beings in a complex culture demands redundancy of mentors and examples. Redundancy is expensive but indispensable. Perhaps this is merely to point out that life is expensive. Just to keep itself going, life makes demands on energy, supplied from inside and outside the human being, that are voracious compared with the undemanding thriftiness of death and decay. A culture, just to keep itself going, makes voracious demands on the energies of many people for hands-on mentoring.” (159)

And what is true of education and life systems (from genes to cells), extends to domains such as AI, machine learning, and robotics where machines are called upon to interact with both familiar and unfamiliar, anticipated and unexpected tasks. There is a technical solution to the many of the resulting challenges; it involves respect for expense and the indispensability of redundancy in design.

January 10, 2019

Apologies to my regular readers for the long silence. I have been busy! I finished a discrete math textbook I have been working on for a while with my former teaching assistant Rachel Zax (now an engineer at Google). It will be out in March, published by Princeton University Press. I started on an edited collection of classic papers of computer science, to be published by MIT Press. And I’m working on a second edition of Blown to Bits with my previous co-authors plus Wendy Seltzer of the W3C.

In the meantime, the College’s sanctions regime has been challenged in two lawsuits, one in federal and one in state court. The group behind the challenge is called Stand Up to Harvard. Links to the two complaints are on this page. The state complaint is particularly interesting, because it is based in part on a specific Massachusetts statute, in Chapter 12:

Section 11H. Whenever any person or persons, whether or not acting under color of law, interfere by threats, intimidation or coercion, or attempt to interfere by threats, intimidation or coercion, with the exercise or enjoyment by any other person or persons of rights secured by the constitution or laws of the United States, or of rights secured by the constitution or laws of the commonwealth, the attorney general may bring a civil action for injunctive or other appropriate equitable relief in order to protect the peaceable exercise or enjoyment of the right or rights secured.

Section 11I. Any person whose exercise or enjoyment of rights secured by the constitution or laws of the United States, or of rights secured by the constitution or laws of the commonwealth, has been interfered with, or attempted to be interfered with, as described in section 11H, may institute and prosecute in his own name and on his own behalf a civil action for injunctive and other appropriate equitable relief as provided for in said section, including the award of compensatory money damages. Any aggrieved person or persons who prevail in an action authorized by this section shall be entitled to an award of the costs of the litigation and reasonable attorneys' fees in an amount to be fixed by the court.

I am not a lawyer and I have no idea what precedents exist for the application of Section 11I, but I can certainly see the argument for its relevance to this situation, in spite of Harvard’s status as a private institution.

From the beginning, some colleagues have suggested that I am making a mountain out of a molehill, that there is no danger of any larger infringement of students’ liberties since the sanctions policy is narrowly targeted and just aimed at killing off the Final Clubs, which everybody hates anyway. Of course it has turned out, as the Chronicle documents, that if that was the aim the policy has missed badly. (And to the friend who told me not to make a federal case out of it, it really is a federal case now.)

But here is the thing that I’ve been worried about all along. I don’t believe the actual reach of the policy is nearly as limited as the written rules suggest.

Do the sanctions have sharp edges, rendering students ineligible for certain specific distinctions and leadership opportunities if they belong to one of a specific list of clubs, but having no consequence for students who don’t seek those specific honors or are not members of any of the blacklisted clubs? Or do the sanctions have a penumbra? When Harvard administrators make a narrow ranking choice between two students for some distinction that is NOT on the official list, will their judgment be colored, explicitly or unconsciously, by the knowledge that one of the students is a member of one of the blacklisted organizations? Letters of recommendation are the obvious example. If a student is a member of a USGSO, how will the dean answer the question, “Is this student really one of your best?” for distinctions that are NOT on the official list of prizes and positions unavailable to USGSO members?

Or what if the student is not a member of any of those organizations, but is a member of some other non-Harvard organization that would fail to meet Harvard’s nondiscrimination standards if it tried to gain official recognition from the College? One of the ethnic sororities, for example, which escape the sanctions regime since they are deemed “inclusive” by virtue of admitting Wellesley students? Or the Harvard Knights of Columbus chapter? There is nothing in the Handbook for Students to suggest that there is any problem with joining these groups. But wouldn’t the deans consider joining such a group to be, if not over the line, at least a little bit out of step with Harvard’s deep values of inclusivity? If strict adherence to Harvard values is so important that you can’t be captain of the Tiddlywinks team if you belong to a noncompliant organization, then when Harvard is making decisions on the basis of featherweight differences, why wouldn’t it take into account such slightly off-target indicators of students’ values?

What does Harvard Law School think about the character of students who belong to organizations that the College has blacklisted, or organizations that resemble them? After all, the sanctions policy has been voted by the President and Fellows, so students are warranted in wondering if HLS is making its judgments in the spirit of the College’s club-membership test of Harvard’s “deepest values”. (This fear is mentioned in the Chronicle piece cited above. Previously, when this question came to me from a student, I asked HLS, but in response got only a link to the Law School’s admission site.)

Now it may well be that nobody is willing to say anything in the middle of ongoing litigation. But there is another possibility. The policies have been word-smithed to crush the single-gender organizations in a legally defensible way. It would then serve Harvard’s purposes to leave doubt about the borderline cases. “If you are worried that the values of your organization aren’t wholly consistent with Harvard’s values, well, we’re not going to help you by saying you shouldn’t be worried. But you don’t really need to know the answer; you can protect yourself by not joining the organization or keeping quiet about your membership.” Keeping 'em guessing expands the de facto reach of the sanctions without the legal risks that would come with articulating a broader reach.

But without some clarity about the extent of the penumbra, students would then be justified in worrying that they are living in a police state in which everyone is an informant and that every private deviation from Harvard’s definition of “inclusiveness” risks being held against them.

Here’s a realistic thought experiment. Suppose you were a senior at Harvard applying to law school and needed a letter from your dean. (The deans live and eat with the students in the Houses so they get to know them personally and understand them as whole, complex people.) Now suppose you were a member of a conservative religious congregation, one that separates men and women in services, and your dean is of the same faith but of a more liberal persuasion. Would you invite your dean to services?

That is the sort of sharing of cultural richness on which the entire College enterprise is grounded and all our theories of learning in a diverse community are based. We are all about getting out of our comfort zones and sharing our differences. But if a student asked me whether I thought such a generous invitation was wise idea, I’d advise against it today. In a Harvard where students are expected to adhere to complete gender inclusiveness as a mark of devotion to Harvard deepest institutional values, there would be too much risk that the dean would come away thinking that a student willing to be relegated to the back of the house at services did not bleed true Crimson.

Bonus links: My letter to a congressional committee about all this, and the wonderful remarks of William James from which I quote at the end: “The day when Harvard shall stamp a single hard and fast type of character upon her children, will be that of her downfall. Our undisciplinables are our proudest product. Let us agree together in hoping that the output of them will never cease.”

January 08, 2019

The award itself is a plush fish with a parasitic lamprey attached to it.

As of yesterday, I’m officially a research symbiont! A committee of health scientists saw fit to give me a Research Symbiont Award which is awarded annually to “a scientist working in any field who has shared data beyond the expectations of their field.” The award was announced at Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing and came with a trip to Hawaii (which I couldn’t take!) and the awesome plush fish with a parasitic lamprey shown in the picture.

Sharing data in ways that are useful to others is a ton of work. It takes more time than you might imagine to prepare, polish, validate, test, and document data for others to use. I think I spent more time working with Andrés Monroy-Hernández on the Scratch Research Dataset than I have any single empirical paper! Although I spent the time doing it because I think it’s an important way to contribute to science, recognition in the form of an award—and a cute stuffed parasitic fish—is super appreciated as well!

These ads would be illegal in DRC, where it is prohibited to announce an election winner before the electoral commission releases results. Furthermore, there’s a good chance that they are fake news, designed to help the incumbent government remain in power. Unfortunately, Facebook and Google’s powerful ad systems may be being used to reinforce election fraud, either by targeting these ads to Brazzaville or to DRC itself, where a small number of people are still on the internet. (While 3G and 4G services are down, some businesses are reported to be online.)

Background: For the past 18 years, Joseph Kabila has been president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who took office after his father, President Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was assassinated in 2001. Elected to two terms in 2006 and 2011, Kabila was mandated to step down from his office in 2016. He didn’t. Instead, DRC’s electoral authority announced that an election couldn’t be held until 2018. This is that election, and Kabila eventually announced that he would not stand.

Instead, he threw his support behind Emmanuel Shadary, who served under Kabila as minister of the interior. During his time serving Kabila, Shadary controlled the police and security services, and is alleged to have used those forces to violently suppress protests and to arrest opposition politicians. He has been sanctioned by the European Union for human rights violations and is prohibited from entering the EU.

The Catholic Church, a powerful force in Congo, monitored the elections using 40,000 observers and states that it knows who actually won the elections. Given that businessman Martin Fayulu had led Shadary by more than 30 percentage points in recent polls, the Church’s call for the release of results is seen as an indication that they believe Shadary has lost the election.

If you are anywhere in DRC, or in Brazzaville, Kigali, Gabarone, Kampala or in other locations that border on DRC, and you’re seeing ads that declare any candidate the winner of the DRC elections, PLEASE TAKE SCREENSHOTS including the URL of the page. Please click on the ad, and screenshot the page it returns, including the URL. Send those screenshots to my team at MIT: ethanz AT mit DOT edu – we are collecting these images so we can ask Google and Facebook to prevent the transmission of false information that could be used to cement a stolen election.

Updates –
– translation in French follows below
– I have spoken with FB – they’ve identified the ad featured above and removed it. That said, there are likely more to come, and we could use help identifying others that appear.

January 05, 2019

Long before curatorial practice became integral to my work, I devoured exhibition catalogs. As a scholar/curator, however, I have tended to chafe at some of the limitations of the standard notions of the catalog.

Here’s a post on an experimental alternative to those conventional notions: the catalog for the Universo futurista / Futurist Universe exhibition (April 21, 2018 – May 19, 2019) at the Fondazione Sonia e Massimo Cirulli in Bologna–a catalog in the form of an (infinitely?) expansible universe of constantly reshuffled pamphlets and posters, bound together in a vacuum-packed wrapper (just like the ones you use to make your sous-vide ribeye).

Collections are forever “in process,” so here’s a catalog that is forever in process.

Here’s the catalog with various cover treatments.

Don’t get me wrong: catalogs perform a fundamental function. Shows come and go; catalogs stay. However meticulously crafted, however long they last, and however much they succeed in lingering in the memory of visitors, exhibitions are an ephemeral form of cultural argument. Travel from venue to venue may grant them a second, third, and even fourth existence. But their life cycle is short and, the day they are gone, they evanesce for good. Works return to storage or lenders, installations invade dumpsters. Installation photographs alone persist.

Catalogs partake of the extended life cycle of books. That means endurance over decades and even centuries, rather than years. Yet catalogs have typically been conceived less as medium-specific artifacts or living documents in their own right, than as marketing devices: on-site gallery supports and off-site extensions of a show. Hence the mad rush to make them coincide with exhibition openings, perversely excluding, in the process, any inclusion of the exhibition qua event or documentation of the event as a spatial argument. To renounce this temporal coupling between exhibition opening and the catalog’s vernissage is to transgress an iron-clad law of modern museology (and gift store economics).

Daniele Ledda (of xycomm in Milan) and I opted for a different approach in the case of Universo futurista / Futurist Universe. Our idea was to develop a catalog that both supported an exhibition and could be produced serially, supplemented and expanded during the run of a show. Since, at core, every codex is an assembly of signatures bound together into a single unit, we chose to unbind the signatures, publish them as individual pamphlets, reshuffle them so as to ensure that the catalog itself would be at once predictable and unpredictable, a mass produced object and an artisanal one-off, and then “bind” them together by means of printed vacuum bags.

A core set of assets were present at the start: curatorial essays, section essays for each of the major units of the show by various collaborators, some micronarratives. Others we added as the show rolled on: an entire folding poster on a room that was invented and designed in improvisatory fashion, during the very process of installation–the Balla Room.

Other assets–on the Spazio Dino Gavina designed by Achille e Pier Giacomo Castiglioni and various outreach activities–remain in preparation. The catalog is recast in the role of an active support, a catalyst of and generator of interactions, an event in itself that lives the same life of the exhibition even as it carries on its legacy.

December 31, 2018

In October, I spoke to Rolling Stone (always wanted to say that!) about how, in their words, “reggaeton, dancehall, baile funk, afrobeats and other diasporic styles are mixing faster than ever — without much help from the U.S. music industry.” The topic has been a sustained thesis on this blog and in my work, of course, so I was happy to talk to Elias Leight about the phenomenon, especially its historical dimensions.

Leight’s article shines light on a number of contemporary intersections in this vein while framing them against the long view, especially with regard to the question of whether we’ve entered a new, internet-abetted era of diasporic interaction. Of course, I had to connect some of my favorite dots (and “dotted” rhythms). As the article opens–

Popular musical rhythms are always skipping and skittering back and forth between Africa and its diasporic communities, from Jamaica to Brazil to Colombia and elsewhere. “That’s a process that’s been going on for a long, long time,” says musicologist Wayne Marshall, who teaches at Berklee College of Music. “What was called, for a while, Congolese rumba and then evolves into soukous — the reason it’s called rumba is because it’s [based on] Cuban son records that became popular in the Congo. It’s circular: The son doesn’t exist without that African musical heritage in the first place.”

But in recent years, the musical conversations appear to be evolving more rapidly. “YouTube in particular has intensified and accelerated that process,” Marshall says.

That’s “nu whirled music” for ya, especially in an age when we bear witness to yet another iteration of this Afro-Atlantic exchange (and indeed, I could have noted that the African heritage that informs son cubano is, more specifically, deeply Congolese!). For more context, contemporary and historical, read the rest –>

Continuing the query into historical patterns of “borrowing” and exchange, I think it’s right for Light to raise the specter of cultural appropriation in the article. Many of the artists more involved in “lateral” Afrodiasporic circulation — i.e., between Brazil and the Dominican Republic, or Jamaica and Ghana, Angola and Oriente — are “structurally” disadvantaged when it comes to exploiting their productions in the global music industry to the same degree as their North American and European counterparts. Wizkid might get sampled on a Drake track and Janet Jackson can stay fresh with an afrobeats-inflected single, but we’ve yet to see a true paradigm shift where such (extractive?) gestures are enough to open up the stage. Shakira had the best selling reggaeton single of the century before Bieber helped Fonsi take the crown. Drake and Rihanna can’t help but eat Jamaica’s food, their heartfelt homages notwithstanding.

As the article does a good job reminding, there’s a lot more out there to listen for — and a lot more that people are listening to. These “lateral” movements across the diaspora can have resounding, inspiring effects everywhere. This was true in the days when recordings could more easily cross borders than people, and it’s as true as ever in the age of increasingly centralized online platforms (YouTube, Spotify) and a vast, diverse world of producers and participants with growing access and power. We’re not there yet but I still get the sense that the wave of the future, as far as global pop, is going to be a tide all its own, on its own terms, rolling along in its own way. We’ve been watching the ripples for a while, and they’re getting bigger and bigger: take, say, the remarkable dominance of Spanish-language bangers among all YouTube uploads in 2018. (Bigup to Elias for that article too! Can’t stop sharing it with students and colleagues.) Indeed, as Eddie Cepeda argues in Pitchfork this week, we might recognize that the sea change is underway and we’re already swimming in new waters. Latin pop is American pop is Afrodiasporic pop is global pop, and if that wasn’t always the case, it’s becoming harder and harder to deny.

At the end of 2018, I’ll leave it at this: what better represents this turn (and this blog — shoutout to ol’ rabbit holes!) than a 20-year-old slice of petróleo crudo by Cutty Ranks and El Chombo proving its enduring resonance (and/or prescience) by garnering nearly a billion views in a little over 6 months?! Talk about ahead of the curve. And while I can’t resist punning on the old Panamanian name for proto-reggaeton — i.e., petróleo — I really love that this track is sweeping the world this year unadulterated and un-remixed (if not unaccompanied). It’s as raw (and refined!) as it was in the first place, way back when it introduced Cuentos de la Cripta 2 in 1998.

Cutty may mean a lot of things when he says “Dame tu cosita” (or not), and while the music industry is not the first that comes to mind, suddenly I can hear it that way too. Here’s to even bigger cosas, y olas, in 2019–

ila, a German magazine devoted to Latin America published a special issue on reggaeton this summer, including an interview with yours truly. If you kann ein bisschen Duetsch lesen (like those of us who studied vergleichende Musikwissenschaft in graduate school), then you can click on that link in the last sentence and read it there.

If not, allow me to share our exchange in English, which is how it happened. This took place back in May, and I would have a lot more to say about some of these questions at this point in this year, but I’ll no doubt have another chance soon — yet another lingering “Despacito effect.” But more on that luego/pronto.

For now, please read on for questions by Britt Weyde, editor of ila, in italics, followed by some answers.

BW: After the „despacito effect“ in 2017 – What’s the actual position of Reggaetón according to your opinion?

W&W: Reggaeton is as popular as ever, at a grassroots and industry level, and on a national/regional as well as global scale. Reggaeton enjoys a strong presence across the pop / club landscapes of the United States, Colombia, Cuba, Spain, and the wider world. YouTube not only bears witness to Despacito’s staggering 5 billion views but to a remarkable presence of reggaeton artists and tracks among the top viewed videos of all time.

BW: The worldwide success of Reggaeton – is it simply demographics (increasing latino population in the US, migrated latino Diaspora in Europe, i.e. Spain)? – or are there other reasons, for example the immense possibilities/capability of the genre to merge/fuse/integrate always other/new musical styles? Is it because Reggaeton already had started as a hybrid genre it easily continues developing/integrating other styles?

W&W: I think demographics play a role in terms of the genre’s ability to establish metropolitan beachheads around the world, but I also think you’re right that there’s a broader aesthetic resonance there. To my ears, it has a lot to do with how reggaeton takes up dancehall’s modern, electronic distillation of a classic Afrodiasporic rhythm. It’s a rhythm that itself undergirds so much of reggaeton’s ability to integrate and fuse with kindred genres. Indeed, while the sound of reggaeton has changed profoundly over the last 20 years — in step with broader trends in hip-hop, dancehall, and global club music — that bedrock rhythm has remained its lynchpin.

BW: Who are the most important/interesting artists representing the genre nowadays (according to your opinion, male and female)?

W&W: This question demands that we think about the genre’s contents — and discontents. Who represents the genre? Who has the authority to say so? Depending on how and where you locate the genre (and its boundaries), you may find that the most interesting or important things, in terms of stylistic innovation and a re-imagination of the genre’s contents, are happening along those borders of the genre (which, as I’ve chronicled, are often intensely policed and debated by reggaeton enthusiasts).

Though it had been floating around since the mid-90s, the term reggaeton only really came to prominence around 2003. Prior to that, artists and audiences were as likely to call it dembow, underground, Spanish reggae, or just reggae — or possibly even melaza (molasses) in Puerto Rico or petróleo (oil) in Panama, terms clearly linked to the genre’s black, working-class base. During the genre’s 2004-08 heyday, all manner of artists were happy to hitch their wagons to reggaeton, but after the hype died down (and perhaps a certain oversaturation), a number of artists sought to distance themselves from it, preferring more vague terms such as “música urbana.” Someone like Residente of Calle 13 rose to prominence on the reggaeton wave but he has long since embraced a range of other styles. Is he (still) a reggaeton artist? He’s definitely making some of the most ambitious and incisive music on the planet right now.

More recently, we’ve seen the rise of Latin trap as an alternative approach for a new generation of Puerto Rican and Latin American artists, and something like the #neoperreo movement queers the genre in more ways than one. Should we consider any of the artists associated with those movements part of the wider reggaeton genre? Are “soundcloud rappers” and DIY dembow scenes part of reggaeton? Are artists from the Dominican Republic, or elsewhere, who use reggaeton rhythms as part of a broader musical palette part of the genre? In which case, Amara La Negra definitely deserves attention for the ways she challenges racism within the music industry.

If the Despacito effect now entails a new wave of reggaeton, branded as such, centered in Colombia, should we consider someone like J Balvin a reggaeton artist? He’s making a strong play for global pop crossover stardom; as such, he’s certainly interesting as a force in bringing Spanish-language songs into the Anglo mainstream, and via reggaeton’s hallmark rhythms. Inevitably, such efforts will reshape the contours of the genre yet again — and inspire no end of debates.

BW: Is Colombia the new Reggaetón hotspot (since Reggaeton Superstars like Maluma, J. Balvin come from there and Nicky Jam lived there for a while)?

W&W: Clearly, Colombian artists have been making major waves for a few years now, and I might go so far as to argue that, where it once resided in San Juan, New York, or Colón, reggaeton’s new capital is arguably Medellín. Although Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee are Puerto Rican, “Despacito” was co-written with a Colombian songwriter, produced by Colombian producers, and initially pitched at the Latin American audience that increasingly looks to Colombia for reggaeton hits. The success of J. Balvin, Maluma, Karol G and others are part and parcel of this wave. Despite the expansion of audience and market-share for the genre this represents, this Colombian turn is not seen by all as a positive development. Some have argued that the Colombian industry has “sanded down” reggaeton’s rough edges to produce a slicker, pop-ready sound, an aesthetic form of gentrification, blanqueamiento / whitewashing, perhaps even appropriation.

BW: What about the postcolonial promise you named in your article “from Música negra to Reggaetón Latino” – that of a convivial, cosmopolitan multiculture – on the musical level we might have got another step closer, but regarding politics we seem far more away?

W&W: Indeed, one might hear global pop today sounding as convivial and cosmopolitan as ever, undergirded by Afrodiasporic rhythms, open to far-flung musical references, and even increasingly multilingual. Meanwhile, we seem to behold a deeply acrimonious social wedge being driven between people based on racism and xenophobia. The fact that a Spanish-language song like “Despacito” would dominate the US and global pop charts during Trump’s first year in office seems downright paradoxical. For me, it actually signals that the vast majority of people are not xenophobes and do not want to build huge walls, whether physical or cultural. For all the “top-down” industry meddling that can structure things, I still think of popular music as a deeply “bottom-up” movement, and the abiding (and sometimes surging) popularity of reggaeton perhaps prefigures the next political wave to come. People who have been voting “with their feet” so to speak, dancing along to beloved polyrhythms, may one day vote together with their ballots too, though that might be an optimistic assessment of the present political circumstances.

BW: With artists like Fonsi, Maluma, Nicky Jam, J.Balvin, Natti Natasha and even Europeans like Enrique Iglesias – Did we reach another stadium of whitewashing the original mostly black music? (exception regarding mainstream superstars is Ozuna)?

W&W: I think one can make the case that, yes, the artists most effectively able to exploit reggaeton in the mass market are artists who are less constrained by anti-blackness. The “mainstream” — which is to say, middle-class consumption — at least in the United States but also across the post-colonial world, is still a sphere of racialized class order. From Elvis and the Rolling Stones through Eminem and Justin Bieber, this has been the case. I believe this is less an indictment of any of the artists that we’re discussing here, however, and more an indictment of white supremacy.

BW: In mainstream reggaetón lyrics refer mostly to romanticism and love, in many hits the reggaetoneros not only rap, nowadays they also sing (p.g. Nicky Jam, Fonsi, Iglesias) – is this still reggaeton or simply latin pop?

W&W: This line, between reggaeton and Latin pop, has often been a blurry one. Certainly, many reggaetoneros have aspired to the level of success that would allow them to operate as pop stars rather than be confined to a smaller genre. Stylistically speaking, reggaetoneros have always mixed rapping with singing, which is the Jamaican way too. If anything, we can hear the recent pop-ification of reggaeton more in the “clean” production values that characterize the Colombian style. That said, Luny Tunes and other producers were pushing reggaeton in that direction during the genre’s initial heyday, and it’s worth remembering that reggaeton itself became Latin pop on its own terms before this more recent turn in which we might hear a more thorough remaking of reggaeton style by pop-leaning producers. Originally, reggaeton was a DIY music made by working-class producers who reveled in their ability to exploit recording technologies — and let these sonic seams proudly show; today, reggaeton is increasingly produced by middle-class or elite producers who approach it not as a tradition but as a stylistic palette.

W&W: As long as racialized, patriarchal structural inequality persists, we’re going to have these debates. Reggaeton itself emerges on the margins, but as a rather macho cultural formation, it also reproduces certain forms of oppression too — especially in terms of gender and sexuality. I’ve tried to chart certain openings with regard to some of reggaeton’s “harder” stances about gender roles or sexual identities, and I think there is a great deal happening in different local scenes that challenges some of these “established” features of the genre. Given a certain degree of exclusion and objectification, I think that women and queer artists should feel free to “appropriate” the genre for their own ends, especially if in service of political critique and intervention. As I explored in my chapter in our Reggaeton book, a great deal of ink has been spilled over whether reggaeton is essentially the property of Jamaicans, Panamanians, Puerto Ricans, Latinos, “morenos,” etc. Discussions about appropriation are, at bottom, about the question of who has the right to exploit some piece of (common / communal) property and whether they reside in or outside the circle.

BW: Some of the successful reggaetoneros of the moment are doing also Trap, recovering in these tracks the gansta/macho/blinblin/objectifying women “aesthetics” (p.e. maluma – cuatro babies, ozuna – la occasion) – is Trap digging Reggaetons grave?

W&W: Given reggaeton’s recent comeback and the fact that it has maintained popularity in so many places, it is hard for me to imagine it being swiftly or simply pushed aside by something like Latin trap. Because reggaeton moved away from hip-hop references at a certain point, the genres now seem further away from each other than, say, reggaeton from dancehall reggae. But hip-hop has always been a part of reggaeton, and Latin trap — and its inevitable intersections with reggaeton — just represents another set of possibilities for collaboration and stylistic innovation.

BW: Regarding gender – there are still not so many women doing reggaeton (or at least having big success) – why?

W&W: As I mentioned above, reggaeton remains a fairly macho genre, and the entire industry is, of course, part of the wider patriarchal culture and society we live in. This has made it difficult for women to succeed in the genre, until fairly recently, unless they were willing to play the sing-song, subservient foil: e.g., Glory or Jenny La Sexy Voz. One big exception of course is Ivy Queen, though it’s notable that she came to prominence by being as tough and fierce as any man in the genre. This is remarkably similar in some ways to the rise of women rappers, many of whom approached the art as hyper-competitive and took up the themes of powerful braggadocio that characterized their male peers’ performances. Over time, though, as we have seen in hip-hop, there are always ways to subvert or break that mold, and in the same way we’ve seen a wider range of possibilities emerge among hip-hop artists (and both men and women, notably), I believe reggaeton has that potential too. Indeed, the number of women participating as artists is as large as ever and offers quite a range of approaches.

BW: On the other hand: regarding lyrics, we don’t have the monolithic macho structures anymore, in J.Balvins “Ambiente” the girl he’s interested in is kissing another girl, or Maluma is up to a quite polyamory stile in his “Felizes los cuatro” – do you share these observations?

W&W: Yes, exactly, and I think this also mirrors popular culture more widely, which has softened in its ideas about policing ideas about gender and sexuality. This is as true for, say, mainstream television as it is for, say, hip-hop and dancehall and reggaeton.

BW: What are legendary producers like Luny Tunes doing today? In ´”The chosen few” they said they would like to do things together with “the Neptunes” (but Pharell is featured in Malumas “Safari” instead) … And some of the reggaetoneros present in “the chosen few” have still success nowadays (Daddy Yankee, Nicky Jam …) what about the others?

W&W: I’m afraid I don’t know what they’re up to at the moment! I wish I’d had a chance to ask DJ Nelson last week. I haven’t really kept tabs on all of these artists, though their “disappearance” is in no way exceptional for popular music. There’s always a lot of turnover and churn. It’s not an easy way to make a career. That said, this does make the careers of Daddy Yankee and Nicky Jam all the more remarkable. Twenty years of popular success is impressive in any genre.

Can’t believe it took me four years to track this down, but I was happy to finally find footage of an interview I did alongside DJ Moortje with Revolt TV while in Aruba back in 2014. The interview appears to have been incorporated into Revolt’s special on the Electric Festival where we were both speaking (and where Moortje was DJing). It’s fun to be reminded what a crazy time this was: the parties were one thing, but for me, it was all about hearing more from bubbling legends like Moortje and Chuckie and soaking up more of that loopy history (and some sun).

Check it out: your boy first appears around 7:45 showing one of his favorite videos by The Noise and tweaking some Ableton clips during a lecture on the history of bubbling, and then I offer a little break down for the crew between 7:53 and 9:00. We hear from Moortje himself (incorrectly ID’d as “Moorcha”), discussing how he “pushed and pushed” rub-a-dub into bubbling, from 10:08 to 10:48.

I look like I’m having a good time hanging with Moortje, which was 100% true! I’ll never forget how he drew turntables in the sand to show how he made the records play even faster.

December 19, 2018

The Cyberlaw Clinic is hiring summer interns for 2019! Come join a dynamic team working on important issues related to technology and the law.

Summer legal interns work on all aspects of the Cyberlaw Clinic’s caseload and, like Fall and Spring semester students, take the lead on the projects they join, supported by the Clinic staff. Although Clinic projects vary from summer to summer, they often include substantive law related to the First Amendment, computer security, digital privacy, intellectual property, civic innovation, emerging technologies, and media and the arts. The Clinic also has a growing practice relating to AI, including with regard to criminal justice, human rights, and creative practice. Interns will be involved in supporting the Clinic’s ongoing docket and in planning decisions about clients, cases, and topic areas to be addressed in the Clinic’s work during the upcoming academic year.

Check out the full job posting for more information and application instructions.

December 15, 2018

Every construction project has a punch list of to-be-done items. Since we’ve been at this for a dozen years, and have a rather long list of development works in progress on our wiki, now seems like a good time and place to list what still needs to be done, but from the individual’s point of view. In other words, things they need but don’t have yet.

So here is a punch list of those things, in the form of a static page rather than a post such as this one. There is also a shortcut to the punch list in the menu above.

Have shopping carts of our own, which we can take from store to store and site to site online, rather than being tied to ones provided only by the stores themselves.

Have personal devices of our own (such as this one) that aren’t cells in a corporate silo, or suction cups on corporate tentacles. (Alas, that’s what we still have with all Apple iOS phones and tablets, and all Android devices with embedded Google apps.)

December 10, 2018

The Cyberlaw Clinic is pleased to announce the release of “A Preservationist’s Guide to the DMCA Exemption for Software Preservation,” a document created in collaboration with the Software Preservation Network and hosted on the SPN website. The guide —authored by fall 2018 Cyberlaw Clinic student Kee Young Lee and Clinical Fellow Kendra Albert — builds on work that the Clinic and SPN have done together over the past year on the 2018 round of anti-circumvention exemptions announced by the Copyright Office in October of this year.

As we noted in a previous blog post, the Copyright Office conducts a rulemaking every three years to identify situations in which individuals should be exempt from liability under Section 1201 of the Copyright Act in cases where they circumvent a “technical measure that effectively controls access” to a copyrighted work. We were pleased that the latest round of exemptions included one that allows libraries, archives, and museums to circumvent technological protection measures on certain lawfully acquired software for the purposes of preserving software and materials that depend on it. The guide released today aims to frame that exemption in useful, practical terms for the librarians and archivists who will rely on and benefit from it. “Getting the exemption is just the first step — SPN and the Cyberlaw Clinic are dedicated to supporting practitioners in using the exemption to preserve software,” said Mx. Albert. “This is the first of a set of guides we plan to release to help institutions make the most of their rights under the law.”

Technology is the American mythos (Dinerstein 2006); a belief system powering the relations between—and politics of—culture and technology. In the Western context, technoculture incorporates Whiteness, White racial ideology, and modernist technological beliefs. This presentation is a critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS), reorienting “race-as-technology” (Chun 2009) to incorporate Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things."
Utilizing critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock 2018), Afro-optimism, and libidinal economic theory, this presentation employs Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic.
Learn more about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-12-04/my-constellation-space-towards-theory-black-cyberculture

December 09, 2018

I’ve heard a surprising “fact” repeated in the CHI and CSCW communities that receiving a best paper award at a conference is uncorrelated with future citations. Although it’s surprising and counterintuitive, it’s a nice thing to think about when you don’t get an award and its a nice thing to say to others when you do. I’ve thought it and said it myself.

It also seems to be untrue. When I tried to check the “fact” recently, I found a body of evidence that suggests that computing papers that receive best paper awards are, in fact, cited more often than papers that do not.

The source of the original “fact” seems to be a CHI 2009 study by Christoph Bartneck and Jun Hu titled “Scientometric Analysis of the CHI Proceedings.” Among many other things, the paper presents a null result for a test of a difference in the distribution of citations across best papers awardees, nominees, and a random sample of non-nominees.

Although the award analysis is only a small part of Bartneck and Hu’s paper, there have been at least two papers have have subsequently brought more attention, more data, and more sophisticated analyses to the question. In 2015, the question was asked by Jaques Wainer, Michael Eckmann, and Anderson Rocha in their paper “Peer-Selected ‘Best Papers’—Are They Really That ‘Good’?“

Wainer et al. build two datasets: one of papers from 12 computer science conferences with citation data from Scopus and another papers from 17 different conferences with citation data from Google Scholar. Because of parametric concerns, Wainer et al. used a non-parametric rank-based technique to compare awardees to non-awardees. Wainer et al. summarize their results as follows:

The probability that a best paper will receive more citations than a non best paper is 0.72 (95% CI = 0.66, 0.77) for the Scopus data, and 0.78 (95% CI = 0.74, 0.81) for the Scholar data. There are no significant changes in the probabilities for different years. Also, 51% of the best papers are among the top 10% most cited papers in each conference/year, and 64% of them are among the top 20% most cited.

Lee looked at 43,000 papers from 81 conferences and built a regression model to predict citations. Taking into an account a number of controls not considered in previous analyses, Lee finds that the marginal effect of receiving a best paper award on citations is positive, well-estimated, and large.

Why did Bartneck and Hu come to such a different conclusions than later work?

Distribution of citations (received by 2009) of CHI papers published between 2004-2007 that were nominated for a best paper award (n=64), received one (n=12), or were part of a random sample of papers that did not (n=76).

My first thought was that perhaps CHI is different than the rest of computing. However, when I looked at the data from Bartneck and Hu’s 2009 study—conveniently included as a figure in their original study—you can see that they did find a higher mean among the award recipients compared to both nominees and non-nominees. The entire distribution of citations among award winners appears to be pushed upwards. Although Bartneck and Hu found an effect, they did not find a statistically significant effect.

Given the more recent work by Wainer et al. and Lee, I’d be willing to venture that the original null finding was a function of the fact that citations is a very noisy measure—especially over a 2-5 post-publication period—and that the Bartneck and Hu dataset was small with only 12 awardees out of 152 papers total. This might have caused problems because the statistical test the authors used was an omnibus test for differences in a three-group sample that was imbalanced heavily toward the two groups (nominees and non-nominees) in which their appears to be little difference. My bet is that the paper’s conclusions on awards is simply an example of how a null effect is not evidence of a non-effect—especially in an underpowered dataset.

Of course, none of this means that award winning papers are better. Despite Wainer et al.’s claim that they are showing that award winning papers are “good,” none of the analyses presented can disentangle the signalling value of an award from differences in underlying paper quality. The packed rooms one routinely finds at best paper sessions at conferences suggest that at least some additional citations received by award winners might be caused by extra exposure caused by the awards themselves. In the future, perhaps people can say something along these lines instead of repeating the “fact” of the non-relationship.

I was honored to give the opening keynote this Friday at the Future of Speech Online, held at the beautiful Knight Conference Center atop the Newseum in Washington, DC. A few friends asked whether I’d share the remarks online, so here’s my best attempt, from my notes. Apologies for the differences between this and the talk I actually delivered – the perils of live performance, y’all.

It’s become necessary at gatherings about the future of media to start by banning the “f” word, a word that gets a lot of play in Washington, especially on the President’s Twitter feed. But there’s lots to talk about in the world of dis- and misinformation, that complicated space where words online can lead someone to “self-investigate” a DC-area pizzaria with a rifle to ensure that it isn’t hosting a pedophile ring in its non-existent basement. Online words have consequences, and we’re still trying to understand whether those consequences include swaying elections in the UK, the US or Brazil, or whether recent political surprises have causes other than the media environment.

When people invoke history in journalism, they’re often talking about the “golden age” of broadcast media, sometime between the end of WWII and Watergate. We had a few authoritative voices – Edward Murrow, Walter Cronkite – and less doubt, perhaps, about what had actually happened in the world. “And that’s the way it is,” like Cronkite liked to say.

That model of media was the result of a very specific moment in technology and in economics that has more to do with the advertising industry depicted in Mad Men than it does with any specific view of how media and democracy work together. A small number of businesses did the very expensive work of producing news and packaged it with advertising on some of the very few channels that could reach a large public, a limited number of print publications and a tiny handful of broadcast television outlets. Those few outlets held a near monopoly over attention and sold slivers of that attention to advertisers for vast sums of money, which is a great business model as long as you can maintain it.

That concentration of power in the hands of a very few outlets meant that media wasn’t very representative. News was largely a white, male space – if you were Black, Latinx, Asian, female, queer or any other identity, news was often a space that wasn’t very open to you. I don’t want to return to a vision of 1950s news, where so many voices were missing from the conversation, even if that conversation was more coherent than the one we encounter today.

Our media now is dramatically more representative, for the simple reason that there are very few structural barriers to expressing yourself, even if there are massive barriers to being heard by an audience. Movements like Black Lives Matter and the gun control protests led by survivors of the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida both leveraged the power of participatory media to be heard and to shift media narratives to stories that often go unreported. This, I would argue, is generally a good thing. But the results of this change (which An Xiao Mina terms the shift from “broadcast consensus to digital dissensus”) means media is more conflicted, confusing and hard to navigate than it was in the mid-20th century. For help understanding our current media, we need a different guide.

I propose Benjamin Franklin, the sort of guy we like to celebrate at MIT. We know him as a statesman, a diplomat and a scientist, but the job he held the longest was as postmaster, first as postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737 and finally getting fired from his position as postmaster general of the Colonies in 1774, when the British finally figured out that he was a revolutionary who could not be trusted. (The dude literally used to post his letters by writing “B. Free Franklin” – as opposed to “B. Franklin – free” – it took the British a while to catch on that this was political propaganda as well as a way of getting free postage.)

Ben was a hustler, an entrepreneur who took full advantage of the various opportunities his position opened, including giving plum patronage jobs to many of the men in his family. His most profitable synergy came from printing newspapers and using the post to distribute them. Early in his career, he’d had difficulty distributing his writings because the postmaster disagreed with their political content and refused to transmit them. Franklin put forth a policy that was both progressive and profitable – neutral carriage. Under his leadership, the job of the post was to deliver letters and printed materials, not to prevent their transmission. This fact, combined with the fact that US presses were not required to reserve “caution money”, huge sums that might be drawn on if a paper was successfully sued for libel, led the US towards a new form of public sphere: a distributed public sphere of mail and print.

When we talk about the public sphere as scholars, we’re usually referring to Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, which was rooted in conversation of wealthy elites in coffeehouses. This dynamic of face to face conversation shapes much of how we traditionally think of the public sphere working, but that’s not how the public sphere evolved in the US. The colonies were physically huge, and in imagining a political conversation that included both Boston and Charleston demanded a creative way of envisioning how political debate could unfold. More than any of the founding fathers, Franklin was responsible for the shaping of this new space for policial discourse.

The founding father who picked up the torch from Franklin as he took over Jefferson’s work as ambassador to France was Dr. Benjamin Rush, a professor and public health advocate whose arguments about the role of the post and the press in the Continental Congress led to the most important piece of legislation you’ve never heard of, the Post Office Act of 1792.

The Post Office Act established the right of the government to control postal routes and gave citizens rights to privacy of their mail… which was deeply undermined by the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, but hey, who’s counting. The low cost of mailing newspapers as well as the absence of stamp taxes or caution money, which made it incredibly prohibitively expensive to operate a press in England, allowed half of all American households to have a newspaper subscription in 1820, a rate that was orders of magnitude higher than in England or France.

But what may be most important about the Post Office Act is that it set up a very powerful cross subsidy. Rather than charging based on weight and distance, as they had before Franklin’s reforms, the US postal system offered tiered service based on the purpose of the speech being exchanged. Exchanging private letters was very costly, while sending newspapers was shockingly cheap: it cost a small fraction of the cost of a private letter to send a newspaper. As a result, newspapers represented 95% of the weight of the mails and 15% of the revenue in 1832. This pricing disparity led to the wonderful phenomenon of cheapskates purchasing newspapers, underlining or pricking holes with a pin under selected words and sending encoded letters home for the price of a paper rather than a letter.

But the really crazy subsidy was the “exchange copy”. Newspapers could send copies to each other for free, with carriage costs paid by the post office. By 1840, The average newspaper received 4300 exchange copies a year — they were swimming in content, and thanks to extremely loose enforcement of copyright laws, a huge percentage of what appeared in the average newspaper was cut and pasted from other newspapers. This giant exchange of content was subsidized by high rates on those who used the posts for personal and commercial purposes.

This system worked really well, creating a postal service that was fiscally sustainable, and which aspired to universal service. By 1831, three quarters of US government civilian jobs were with the postal service. In a literal sense, the early US nation was a postal service with a small representative government and a tiny military attached to it. But the postal system was huge because it needed to be — there were 8700 post offices by 1830, including over 400 in my home state of Massachusetts alone, which is saying something, as there are only 351 towns in Massachusetts.

The key thing to understand about this is that it’s not a happy accident that we ended up with a public sphere that worked this way. Our founders built and regulated the postal system in such a way that its function as a sphere of public discourse was primary and its role as a tool for commerce and personal communication was secondary. They took on this massive undertaking explicitly because they believed that to have a self-governing nation, we needed not only representation in Congress, but a public sphere, a space for conversation about what the nation would and could be. And because the US was vast, and because the goal was to expand civic participation far beyond the urban bourgeois, it needed to be a distributed, participatory public sphere. To be clear, this was far than a universal public sphere – the founders saw this as a space for propertied white men – but the infrastructures of post and mail created powerful tools for abolitionists, for newspapers that helped free black men connect across vast distances, that helped carry the case for women’s suffrage.

All that said, I’m not going to argue for a return to the press of the late 18th and early 19th century any more than I would argue for a return to Murrow or Cronkite. Franklin’s press was littered with advertisements to a degree we’d find disconcerting today – as much as 90% of the text in these papers were commercial in nature, helping explain why so many of these early newspapers were called The Advertiser. The press was partisan, to an almost absurd degree. It wasn’t a party press – the political parties of the time emerged from the press, rather than the other way around. You read Hamilton’s New York Evening Post, and that, more than anything else, identified you as a Federalist.

Oh, and the 18th century press was LOADED with fake news. I don’t just mean Franklin’s habit of inventing personas like Silence Dogood, who he created because his brother’s paper, the New England Courtant, wouldn’t publish his letters until he began using a pen name. Franklin’s papers ran stories accusing the British of paying Indians to scalp settlers, a slander that both helped sell papers and turn colonists against the British. (Yeah, that part doesn’t get much play in his autobiography for some reason.)

Worse was Sam Adams – you know, the beer guy – who was a notorious propagandist whose articles in the Boston Gazette led a mob to sack the house of Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts Bay. The folks who attacked his house – “They were old men, young men, and boys barely old enough to read, all of them jacked up on ninety-proof Sam Adams prose,” – believed Adams that Hutchinson was responsible for the hated Stamp Act, a tax on newspapers. Actually, Hutchinson was against the stamp act and had warned his superiors in England that the colonists would never accept this restriction on their speech. (This story is from Eric Burns’s wonderful book, Infamous Scribblers)

Mis/disinformation isn’t a new phenomenon in American civic discourse. Nor is a disputatious, partisan press that veers into propaganda. But these shortcomings where counterbalanced by a carefully constructed ecosystem where diversity and free, inexpensive flow of information helped counterbalance the excesses that otherwise might have plagued the system.

The public sphere of the mid-20th century was carefully constructed as well. It was shaped by a strong professional norm, the firewall between the business and journalism operations of a newspaper, which allowed news organizations to investigate the politically powerful, and even the corporations that funded them. The introduction of the Fairness doctrine in 1949 somewhat heavyhandedly tried to assure equal representation of opposing viewpoints in the media. And after FCC commissioner Newt Minow declared the emerging space of television a “vast wasteland” in 1961, the philanthropic community responded by building the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and building public media as we know it in America.

The point is not that any of these interventions might be the right medicine for what ails us at present, but that the shape of our media is a choice. The media environment we live in is the most powerful factor that influences our civic and political life, and that these environments aren’t inevitable – they can be shaped by policy and by norms, as well as by technology.

We seem to have a strange sense of powerlessness when it comes to coping with the contemporary media environment. After stepping down from his role as VP of growth for Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya now warns us that social networks are bad for us, and tells us that “i don’t let my kids use that shit.” It might have been nice had he mentioned something while working to bring 2.2 billion people to the platform. And perhaps he could do something with the billion dollars he made working for the company beyond a mea culpa.

Much of the discourse about social networks doesn’t develop beyond critique. We’re told that social networks are addictive and bad for our psychological health. We’re told they’re killing journalism. We hear reporting that social networks are easily manipulated and used to sway elections. And we’re told that the ideological isolation and polarization they cause is destroying our democracy.

But as a scholar, I’ve got to be a bit cautious about these claims. My lab does a lot of research on the dynamics of social media. My smart friends just published a 500 page book on the use of social media in the 2016 elections using the tools built in my lab. Despite what we’re learning, I will freely admit that there is TONS we don’t know about how social media is influencing political discourse and opinion. My guess is that honest scholars will tell you that the jury’s out on the psychological impacts of social media as well. And it’s not clear whether the damage that’s been done to journalism’s business model is the fault of the internet, or even whether journalism – rather than the journalism business – is suffering at present.

When we accept these equations that blame the current political and cultural moment on social media as valid, we end up with simplistic solutions to the dilemmas we face. There are dozens of organizations – some of them excellent – working to factcheck social media and reduce the amount of misinformation online. Much as factchecking became a part of the journalistic mainstream over the past decade, I expect social media factchecking to spread. But I also don’t expect it to radically alter the media environment. The people who most need factchecks are the least likely to see them or to believe them. If factchecking radically changed public discourse, it’s hard to imagine that after a decade of excellent work the American public would have elected a serial fabricator to the nation’s highest office.

Another overly simple solution: It’s become popular to advocate for people to delete their Facebook accounts, both as a form of protest and a way of reclaiming their interactions with the world. There’s nothing wrong with deleting your Facebook account, but it’s a mighty thin form of protest that’s unlikely to have much impact. Albert Hirschmann talked about exit and voice as strategies for trying to influence corporate behavior – if a product decreases in quality, you can switch to another brand, sending a signal to the corporation that their behavior needs to be changed. But Hirschmann notes that some systems, particularly political systems, can’t be exited – instead, you’ve got to use voice to make an impact. And while you, personally, can get off Facebook, you can’t get away from what Facebook is (or isn’t) doing to society locally or globally.

I want to challenge people to move beyond these criticisms of social networks – including all the valid ones – and towards a vision of what we’d like social media to do for us in a democracy. I want us to stop asking whether social media is good for democracy and start asking “What do we want social media to do for democracy?”

My friend Michael Schudson took on this question a decade ago in a slightly different context. In his book, Why Democracies Needs an Unloveable Press, he offered a brilliant essay titled “Six or Seven Things the News Can Do For Democracy”. Some of these things are unsurprising – they’re what we expect the press to do, to inform us, to investigate stories that demand deep reporting, to analyze the news of the day and put it into context. Other possible functions are less well known. The news can create a public forum, a space where people discuss the events of the day. It can mobilize people into a movement, sending them out into the streets, something that US newspapers have a strong taboo against doing, but which European media is much more comfortable advocating for. News can help give us empathy for people distant from us who are suffering from tragedies preventable and otherwise.

Importantly, Schudson doesn’t argue that media does all these things well, or that any one news organization can or should do all these things. Some of these goals come into conflict – if you are using your news organization for mobilization, it may conflict with its believability as an investigative outlet, for instance. But these are possible, legitimate functions for news media in a democracy and we could optimize any media outlet for any of these goals. In a diverse, rich media landscape, we might cover all these democratic functions through a plurality of media, trying to achieve different goals but working together to provide a public sphere.

I’m lazy, so I stole Schudson’s framing and wrote an essay this summer called “Six or Seven Things Social Media Can Do for Democracy”. As in Schudson’s essay, I’m arguing that social media could do these things, not that it currently does. And as in Schudson’s model, there are aspects of social media that are contradictory – the platform that lets us connect with the likeminded, amplify ideas and mobilize – the sort of platform that led people to protest in the Arab Spring – is not the same platform that is going to provide a sane and safe space for deliberation or introduce us to a diversity of people and ideas. The point is that we can build a variety of platforms, some of which help us connect with friends we already know, others which introduce us to people we don’t know. Some could help us mobilize action around causes we care about, others could introduce us to people we disagree with and help us have meaningful conversations.

In imagining what this vision of social media could look like, I’m imaging media that’s under personal control, plural in purpose, public in spirit and participatory in governance. (Those four P’s are nice and explosive when you’re giving a speech. Secrets of the craft, people.)

Personal – The first steps we’ve taken towards this vision of media in our lab is the Gobo.social project. Gobo is a social media aggregator – it allows you to view multiple social networks through the same client, a precursor for the social media world I’m imagining. It’s also deeply personalizable – you control a set of filters that let you decide the gender balance of friends you’re hearing from, whether you want to hear posts that are funny or serious, widely shared or shared only with a small group. These are features we believe should be available within social networks like Facebook, which uses an opaque algorithm to decide whose posts you see and whose are suppressed. Gobo puts that power in your hands, and shows you why each post is included or excluded from your feed, a feature we believe should be true on every social network. If the networks won’t provide these services, we can build them into tools we use with all social networks and put that control back into our hands.

Plural in purpose – LinkedIn doesn’t have much of a problem with hate speech – the people who use it know their possible next employer is reading their profile and behave accordingly. It’s not that different in function from Facebook, but the norms that govern the community’s behavior are sharply different. There’s potential to create a great diversity of online spaces with different purposes, each of which have different behaviors and norms. One of the main problems with Facebook is its desire to be all things to all people. There’s not a simple set of norms that governs a platform that some use for sharing baby photos and others see as a space for political combat. A social media landscape that’s plural would allow different rulesets for different spaces.

Public in spirit – Wael Ghonim was one of the key organizers of the Arab Spring in Egypt. He administered the We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page, which organized Egyptian resistance in the name of a young man tortured to death by the police. When young people began occupying Tahrir Square, Hosni Mubarak contacted Ghonim and asked him to call his people off, something Ghonim explained he couldn’t do. But while Facebook helped lead people into the streets, Ghonim was disappointed with its limitations as a space for serious discussions for how the Egyptian people might govern after the revolution. After liberal Egyptians were shut out of the country’s politics, Ghonim created Parlio, a social network designed not to reach everyone, but to reach a small audience of current and future civic leaders. The network had strong rules requiring civility and polite discussion and wasn’t shy about kicking abusers off the network. While it was a private company, eventually acquired by Quora (another social media company with a different purpose and practices from either Facebook or Twitter), it was public in spirit and intent.

Some innovative new networks may be built by companies who see value in creating civic-minded public spaces. But I suspect others will be built by public-spirited actors, local governments that want to create conversations between neighbors, civil society organizations who want to increase understanding because people from diverse backgrounds. I’m particularly excited about the idea that European public broadcasters could see value in building new social media spaces devoted to amplifying marginalized voices and creating dialog about difficult local issues.

Participatory in governance – Networks like Facebook and Twitter are largely unaccountable to their users. In the spirit of Rebecca MacKinnon’s Consent of the Networked, they are unenlightened monarchs, constrained by no Magna Carta and influenceable only by public shaming or by market forces. That’s not how social media systems have to operate. Reddit has an enormous range of communities, from the toxic to the deeply informative. THe difference, again, is not technology, but governance – the /r/science community has thousands of volunteer moderators who follow a strict set of rules to keep conversations productive and rooted in peer-reviewed research. As we imagine a world with a plurality of public-spirited social media communities, there’s no reason most can’t be self governing. Indeed, since moderation is one of the most expensive tasks in moderating an online community, there may be no other way to build many of these online spaces.

It’s important that we start imagining a pro-democratic vision of social media for the simple reason that people are already imagining the alternative. As the ethnonationalist right gets kicked off platforms like Twitter, they are building a possible future of social media on sites like gab.ai, a short-messaging platform that builds on Twitter but adds some interesting community features. It’s a mistake to let the Nazis develop the future of online community. And while there’s innovation coming from the crypto-libertarian camp as well, with platforms like Steemit adding compensation for contributions in the form of reputational currency, there’s a shortage of large-scale experiments that treat the public sphere as a public good. Imagining a world in which our public spaces are controlled by large corporations that might, someday, be lightly regulated isn’t good enough.

My favorite Ben Franklin quote is “Well done is better than well said.” It’s time for us to move beyond critiques and conversations about what’s wrong with social media with the hard work of imagining and building something better. If we want social media that increases diversity, creates a space for civil discourse, we have to build it. At the very least, we need to build the environment where it can happen. We need to fight for interoperability, for transparency and for the right to build our own networks.

I am a firm believer that America is a nation of ideas. One of the most powerful of those ideas was that we could, as a nation, build am media ecosystem that allowed us to participate in our own governance. At a moment where there’s fear and doubt about the state of our democracy, it’s a good time to ask just what we’re going to build.

December 04, 2018

Perspectives from Europe and the US on a Law and Policy Agenda
Digital technologies affect the lives of billions of people around the world daily. The decisions of private platforms and tech developers — and the public institutions that regulate their conduct — can shape public discourse, with profound impacts on democracy, liberty, autonomy, and governance.
This panel provides a broad overview of the landscape for regulating cutting-edge digital technologies in Europe and the US. The discussion focuses on mechanisms for ensuring tech developers and platforms build and deploy their products and services in a manner that is consistent with fundamental human rights, including the rights to freedom of expression and privacy.
Panelists bring a wealth of experience to the table and will address considerations with respect to the role that strategic litigation, legislation and regulation, and multi-stakeholder initiatives that operate outside of government can play in setting a human rights tech agenda. Topics of discussion will include the advent of a new privacy regime in Europe in the form of the General Data Protection Regulation; challenging surveillance in the age of mass data collection; the complex landscape for platforms making content moderation decisions; and the long-range impact of technologies that incorporate algorithms, AI, and, machine learning.
Participants include Nani Jansen Reventlow, Can Yeginsu, Vivek Krishnamurthy, and Jessica Fjeld (Panel Moderator).
For more info on this event visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-11-30/promoting-fairness-equity-and-human-rights-tech

November 30, 2018

Infectious disease emergencies are opportunities to test the efficacy of newly developed interventions — for example, drugs, vaccines, and treatment regimens. Yet they raise many intertwined challenges around politics, logistics, ethics, and study design.
In this talk — part of our Digital Health @ Harvard series — Professor Marc Lipsitch describes his work on computer simulation of vaccine trials during epidemics to assess options for trial design, as well as some of his recent work on the ethics of trials in emergencies, and stimulates discussion on the intersection of these two topics to help disentangle ethical from political and logistical concerns, as well as to reduce the time pressure to make a decision and encourage rational deliberation by future stakeholders.
Find out more info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-11-27/computer-simulations-enhance-vaccine-trials

The Cyberlaw Clinic is thrilled to have supported our friend Ji Qie and the rest of the team that launched patentpandas.org this week. The site aims to “help make patent law friendly for everyone,” offers stories from “[e]veryday people” about “their patent adventures and misadventures,” and provides a wide range of resources for creators and entrepreneurs about interacting with the patent system. Legal resources on the site address issues like “What Can Be Patented?” and “I Got a Cease and Desist Letter!.” Fall 2018 Clinic student Carol Lin worked with the Cyberlaw Clinic’s Assistant Director, Jessica Fjeld, to guide the project. (Photo credit: Andy Sellars.)

November 29, 2018

Content regulation emerged as a controversial topic earlier this year after right-wing personality and frequent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones had his Infowars podcast removed from most platforms, including Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, and RadioPublic. Amid a social media firestorm, platforms rushed to ban Jones, sometimes within hours of each other, and often without articulating how exactly Jones’ speech violated their terms. The incident drew attention to the ethical and logistical challenges podcasting platforms face in balancing safety, diversity, and respect for free speech principles when articulating what content they allow on their services, and the difficulties in implementing such policies consistently.

The memo emerged from the Clinic team’s discussions with RadioPublic following the Infowars controversy, and shares the results of our research about how the industry is presently dealing with hateful content through an analysis of major podcast platform content regulation policies. It lays out a concrete range of options platforms have to moderate offensive speech. It’s our hope that this memo helps tailor the wider conversation about content moderation, including the recent release of guidelines from the Change the Terms coalition, to the particular needs of podcasting platforms.

Current Content Policies in the Market

We found that podcast platforms varied widely in the language of their content policies. Some were short and broad—for example, Apple Podcasts’ terms merely say that they will prohibit content that may be “construed as racist, misogynist, or homophobic” or that depicts “hate themes.” But even within Apple there are significantly different approaches to content regulation. Apple’s App Store Guidelines, unlike their podcast equivalents, include seven paragraphs defining “offensive content.”

The type of language policies use has implications for how they regulate. Those that rely on expansive terms like “hate themes” or “mean-spirited content” have greater flexibility in deciding what content violates the policy. But they also provide little notice to podcasters and listeners about what content will be determined to violate the policy, and may invite seemingly arbitrary application. Earlier this year, Spotify received criticism for its enforcement of a vague “hateful conduct” policy and was forced to revise the policy and issue a statement admitting its error. On the other hand, policies with narrower, more specific terms provide more notice to the community but may leave a platform with its hands tied when content comes along that doesn’t fit neatly into that language.

Options for Regulation

The memo presents five possible strategies that podcast platforms could take with respect to content regulation. They are tailored to platforms that aggregate podcast feeds, as opposed to those that selectively host a subset of chosen podcast content on their own servers. The strategies fall on a spectrum from less regulation (and a stronger stand on freedom of speech) to more regulation (and a stronger stand on safety and respectful community engagement).

Starting with the least amount of regulation required, one option platforms have is to do nothing. A platform could decide that it should not have a say in deciding what content is permissible and what is not, and take a strong stance on allowing all voices to be heard, no matter how offensive. The next option, if the platform isn’t comfortable giving harmful speech a fully equal voice, would be to restrict affirmative promotion of offensive material while still allowing the podcasts to remain on the platform and appear in search results. Most platforms have some measure of affirmative promotion, whether through allowing podcasts to pay for prominent placement, or generating recommendations for listeners.

The next choice for moderation implicates the technical way that podcasts are fed through the platform. Hosts like RadioPublic provide access to podcasts’ RSS feeds; they do not actually store content themselves. They provide the additional service of listing the podcast in a catalog and search engine, but ultimately all that is required to listen to a podcast on the platform is the RSS feed’s URL – similarly to how a web browser like Chrome makes it possible for users to access an HTML page hosted anywhere. Therefore, a platform has the option of delisting content from its catalog, ensuring it won’t turn up in user search results, but allowing users with the URL to the RSS feed manually. This approach does much more to limit the reach of harmful speech than merely stopping affirmative promotion, but it won’t stop users from posting a link to the offensive content that uses the platform’s domain and branding.

Finally, the platform can block access to a podcast’s RSS feed altogether. This is the inverse of the do-nothing approach: platforms have the option to take a strong stance that certain content is simply not allowed on the platform in any form.

A Balancing Act

The choices a podcast platform faces—both in terms of the language of a policy and its options in implementation—involve balancing weighty principles. Platforms can choose to reserve more flexibility for themselves, taking an “I-know-it-when-I-see-it” approach. Or they can opt for more notice and transparency, with an eye towards moderating in a neutral and non-arbitrary manner.

There is also the ultimate trade-off between freedom of speech and reducing harm. Accepting that certain content has the capacity to harm, there is value to limiting the reach of such harm. But there is also value—especially given the spirit of the open internet in which podcasting was born—to a free and open marketplace of ideas. This balance is not black and white; platforms can opt for a middle ground that reflects the value in both positions, as some of the options above do. But there are tradeoffs in each one.

One final consideration goes into the balance and cannot be overlooked: resources. Many podcasting platforms are still in the early stages of development, and may not have the staff to comb through all of the content that comes through to find offensive content. And long-form spoken audio—published in increasingly wide range of languages—poses particular challenges to both human and automated inspection. A less regulatory approach might therefore be easier to implement consistently. To what extent should resource constraints factor into an otherwise value-laden decision?

True, the consequences of any particular platform’s decision are limited to its services and are unlikely to effectively eradicate content from the internet, as other players with the option to moderate content might; nevertheless, each company’s actions should reflect the its mission and the values of its employees.

November 20, 2018

Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that’s increasingly making us behave like simple machines? Brett Frischmann discusses what’s happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and supposedly smart environments. He explains how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand in hand with engineering predictable and programmable people.
For more information, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-11-13/re-engineering-humanity

November 12, 2018

Assessing Government Development, Deployment, & Use of Tech Tools
A close look at the inner workings of government, with a particular focus on the ways in which federal, state, and local government institutions leverage technology and technical resources to best serve citizens.
Alvand Salehi and Kathy Pham bring deep expertise in federal and state government deployment of technology and in establishing policies within government to foster and promote responsible tech development initiatives. They share stories from their time in government and offer thoughts on best practices for government institutions developing approaches to technology development and procurement that enhance the provision of government services.
The event is moderated by Berkman Klein Center co-director, Chris Bavitz.
For more info on this event, visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-11-06/state-government-technology

November 06, 2018

Platforms, Content Moderation, & the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media
In this talk, author Tarleton Gillespie discusses how social media platforms police what we post online – and the societal impact of these decisions. He flips the story to argue that content moderation is not ancillary to what platforms do; it is essential, definitional, and constitutional. Given that, the very fact of moderation should change how we understand what platforms are.
For more information, visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-30/custodians-internet

October 28, 2018

This weekend, the Andover community celebrates the thirtieth annual weekend gathering of the Gender-Sexuality Alliance (G.S.A.). This important milestone merits attention and reflection. The G.S.A. has played a central role in supporting students (and adults, for that matter) of all genders and sexualities on campus at Andover.

This week also marks the publication by the New York Times of a memo obtained by the Trump Administration about a proposal to “define out of existence” transgender persons.

I stand with the editors of the Phillipian, Andover’s independent student newspaper, in their opposition to this policy. They note, correctly, that this proposed policy “has cast a shadow over the celebrations” of the G.S.A.’s thirtieth anniversary. In this week’s paper, the Phillipian editorialized:

Regardless of this legal statement issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, we hope that the members of the Andover community will continue to support and love each other, and accept everyone for their unique identities and backgrounds. Andover is a community thoroughly and perpetually committed to diversity, and no announcement or any administration will change that commitment. In the face of these alarming news headlines and government-issued statements, the Andover community must recommit to its values of Non Sibi, compassion, and kindness, and never succumb to the pressures of fear, difference, and hate.

My friend Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, also published an article on this proposed policy that made me think — as all Joi’s writing does. I’m with Joi when he writes:

And so, in the face of an appalling and nonsensical step backwards in government policy, I’d like to offer my support to all trans, gender non-conforming, and/or nonbinary members of the Media Lab and MIT community. More broadly, I’m calling on leaders of academic communities to speak out on this issue and be very clear that they see, they support, they affirm, and they will protect trans people in their communities.

This proposed policy is inconsistent with our belief in not only bringing Youth from Every Quarter to Andover but also in supporting them during their growth, no matter their gender or sexuality. It is also inconsistent with Andover’s Statement of Purpose in which we affirm our commitment to “a deeper awareness of the global community” and our non-discrimination policy affirming that “we do not discriminate on the basis of gender, gender identity, gender expression…and sexual orientation.” We affirm the full humanity and diversity of our students and all those in our adult community.

This issue of equal rights for all is not only a matter of federal law and policy. Those who live in Massachusetts have a chance to weigh in on this topic on Election Day — November 6, 2018 — as well. The topic of transgender rights is on the ballot as Question 3. The official description of all ballot questions appears on the Secretary of State’s website.

Adolescence is a complicated time no matter who you are. Those young people who are questioning their gender and sexuality deserve support, affirmation, and love, just as all students do. No federal or state policy can change that in our community.

October 26, 2018

Yesterday, the Library of Congress handed a significant win to digital preservationists. On October 26, 2018, the Library of Congress granted an exemption to the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision for libraries, archives, and museums to circumvent technological protection measures on certain lawfully acquired software for the purposes of preserving software and materials that depend on it. This exemption will significantly reduce the legal risk involved in preserving software that is no longer available for purchase. The new exemptions will go into effect on October 28, 2018. The announcement came after a year of rulemaking proceedings before the Copyright Office, and the involvement of several semesters of Clinic students, including Evelyn Chang, Anderson Grossman, Jillian Goodman, Erika Herrera, Austin Bohn, and Erin Thomas. You can read our previous blog posts about the Clinic’s involvement here and here.

Background

17 U.S.C. § 1201 prohibits circumvention of a “technical measure that effectively controls access” to a copyrighted work. This provision has the effect of forbidding someone from breaking “digital rights management” or “DRM” technology – think, for example, of the copy-control technologies that restrict copying of DVDs or CDs (containing film or software). Under Section 1201, the circumvention of the access control measure is itself a violation — one can be held liable for violating Section 1201 by breaking DRM even if the underlying use of the work protected by that DRM is lawful. This can lead to strange results — e.g., someone copies a clip from a DVD for educational purposes (clearly a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act, no liability) but breaks DRM on the DVD in doing so (thus violating Section 1201 and incurring potential liability for that violation).

Recognizing this problem, the law provides that the Copyright Office shall conduct a rulemaking proceeding every three years to consider requests for exemptions from liability under Section 1201. Since the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking initiating the seventh triennial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) rulemaking proceedings last fall, the Cyberlaw Clinic has represented the Software Preservation Network (SPN) before the Copyright Office. The SPN and the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) sought an exemption to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions to allow libraries, archivists, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions to preserve software and software-dependent materials. SPN is an organization dedicated to digital preservation and ensuring long term access to software. The LCA represents librarians in the United States and Canada in addressing copyright and related IP issues.

Why Software Preservation Matters

Software is an important part of our daily lives, and it has changed how we interact with the world. Many writers turn to word processing software instead of the typewriter, and many artists turn to graphics tablets instead of the canvas. As a result, many creative works today are “born digital,” unlike traditionally analog works like literary manuscripts or paintings. We even rely on software to create digital copies of these old analog works to protect their contents from the inevitable degradation of the physical media.

This increased dependence on software as a medium for creative expression has led to increased efforts for preservation of software and software-dependent materials by university libraries and research institutions. Preservation of these works indisputably serves two laudable purposes: to allow historians to document an important aspect of modern culture, and to enable researchers to understand how older software worked and how past users experienced that software.

But the unrelenting march of technology stymies the efforts of digital preservationists. New software products become outdated and obsolete rapidly due to continuing advancements in hardware and software. The modern practice in the software industry of periodically releasing new products and versions while dropping support for old products and versions means that archivists and preservationists may never be able to obtain copies of certain software for preservation purposes. And since computer programs often use proprietary file formats that can change across versions, losing access to software also means losing access to digital files that can only be opened using that software. For example, current versions of AutoCAD do not support opening old AutoCAD files. And even if some computer programs currently support backward compatibility, there is no guarantee that they will continue to support old filetypes going forward.

How the Law Gets in the Way of Preserving Software

Despite the importance of software preservation and the known technological challenges faced by digital preservationists, current legal frameworks frustrate, rather than facilitate, preservation efforts. Even if a copy of old software can be located, preservationists may have difficulty seeking licenses or permissions because the current holders of rights to the old software may not be identifiable. The older the software, the more difficult. And even if rightsholders can be located, they may have little incentive to incur the transaction costs associated with licensing their old software because no market exists for the software.

Legally obtaining copies of old computer programs is not the end of preservationists’ troubles. Computer programs often include built-in technological protection measures (TPMs) to prevent access by unauthorized users. TPMs may require the user to provide product keys or passwords, insert a CD or dongle, or connect to an Internet server for authentication. But preservationists may not be able to access the software using TPMs in the manner intended by the developers, especially for older software. Old TPMs may require using obsolete operating systems, or inserting floppy disks despite modern computers no longer supporting floppy disk drives. If librarians or preservationists circumvent these TPMs in their efforts to study and preserve old computer programs and files, they would be subject to legal liability under the DMCA. Even if rightsholders never actually bring lawsuits against preservationists for circumventing TPMs, as friend of the Clinic Brandon Butler’s recent report suggests, the mere threat of legal liability causes a chilling effect. The consequence is forever losing software and software-dependent materials to the ages.

The Exemption

Most parties, including the opponents, agreed that software preservation is a worthwhile endeavor. While the opponents objected to the broad scope of SPN’s proposed exemption, the Acting Register of Copyrights agreed that librarians, archivists, and preservationists need more latitude in their ability to access computer programs and computer program-dependent materials. And after a year of public comments and hearings, the Librarian of Congress, adopting the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, issued a final rule containing an exemption that encompasses much of what the SPN requested.

The final rule allows eligible libraries, archives, and museums to circumvent technological protection measures on certain lawfully acquired computer programs (including video games) to preserve computer programs and computer program-dependent materials. The final rule includes the SPN’s suggestion, in consideration of the opponents’ concerns about breadth, that the exemption be limited to computer programs that are no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace. The Library of Congress did create some limitations on the exemption, requiring that the computer program is not distributed outside the physical premises of the eligible library, archives, or museum.

Conclusion

On the whole, the new exemption gives digital preservationists significantly more leeway to continue their important work without living under a cloud of litigation risk. The Cyberlaw Clinic will continue to work with the SPN and other software preservation groups to ensure that the law does not inhibit continued access to software for scholarship and research, and will release a more comprehensive guide to the new exemption for preservationists in the coming weeks.

October 25, 2018

Virginia Eubanks joins us for a rousing conversation about her timely and provocative book, Automating Inequality.
In Automating Inequality, Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile. "This book is downright scary,” says Naomi Klein, “but with its striking research and moving, indelible portraits of life in the ‘digital poorhouse,’ you will emerge smarter and more empowered to demand justice.”
More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-23/automating-inequality

October 23, 2018

Rachel Gershon — Senior Associate at the Center for Health Law and Economics at UMass Medical School — discusses the nature of disability and disability determination; the resulting limitations in data availability; and implications for public policy.
This year, several states applied for and received permission from the federal government to implement work requirements in their Medicaid programs. Policy designs vary by state, but all states build in considerations for people with disabilities. These considerations include exemptions and exceptions from work requirements for individuals unable to work due to a disability.
Due to the nature of disability and the nature of disability determination processes, states will face limitations in identifying all individuals who are unable to work due to a disability. Medical claims do not necessarily provide enough information to determine a person’s ability to work. Medical diagnoses and disability determinations both can lag symptoms by months or years. As a result, relying on claims or disability determination data could leave out individuals who are unable to work due to a disability. At the same time, waiting for a diagnosis or a disability determination is a critical time period for individuals with disabilities to be able to access health care.
For more information visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-16/determining-disability

October 22, 2018

Leaders and scholars of online communities tend of think of community growth as the aggregate effect of inexperienced individuals arriving one-by-one. However, there is increasing evidence that growth in many online communities today involves newcomers arriving in groups with previous experience together in other communities. This difference has deep implications for how we think about the process of integrating newcomers. Instead of focusing only on individual socialization into the group culture, we must also understand how to manage mergers of existing groups with distinct cultures. Unfortunately, online community mergers have, to our knowledge, never been studied systematically.

To better understand mergers, my student Charlie Kiene spent six months in 2017 conducting ethnographic participant observation in two World of Warcraft raid guilds planning and undergoing mergers. The results—visible in the attendance plot below—shows that the top merger led to a thriving and sustainable community while the bottom merger led to failure and the eventual dissolution of the group. Why did one merger succeed while the other failed? What can managers of other communities learn from these examples?

In a new paper that will be published in the Proceedings of of the ACM Conference on Computer-supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) and that Charlie will present in New Jersey next month, I teamed up with Charlie and Aaron Shaw try to answer these questions.

Raid team attendance before and after merging. Guilds were given pseudonyms to protect the identity of the research subjects.

In our research setting, World of Warcraft (WoW), players form organized groups called “guilds” to take on the game’s toughest bosses in virtual dungeons that are called “raids.” Raids can be extremely challenging, and they require a large number of players to be successful. Below is a video demonstrating the kind of communication and coordination needed to be successful as a raid team in WoW.

Because participation in a raid guild requires time, discipline, and emotional investment, raid guilds are constantly losing members and recruiting new ones to resupply their ranks. One common strategy for doing so is arranging formal mergers. Our study involved following two such groups as they completed mergers. To collect data for our study, Charlie joined both groups, attended and recorded all activities, took copious field notes, and spent hours interviewing leaders.

Although our team did not anticipate the divergent outcomes shown in the figure above when we began, we analyzed our data with an eye toward identifying themes that might point to reasons for the success of one merger and the failure of the other. The answers that emerged from our analysis suggest that the key differences that led one merger to be successful and the other to fail revolved around differences in the ways that the two mergers managed organizational culture. This basic insight is supported by a body of research about organizational culture in firms but seem to have not made it onto the radar of most members or scholars of online communities. My coauthors and I think more attention to the role that organizational culture plays in online communities is essential.

We found evidence of cultural incompatibility in both mergers and it seems likely that some degree of cultural clashes is inevitable in any merger. The most important result of our analysis are three observations we drew about specific things that the successful merger did to effectively manage organizational culture. Drawn from our analysis, these themes point to concrete things that other communities facing mergers—either formal or informal—can do.

A recent, random example of a guild merger recruitment post found on the WoW forums.

First, when planning mergers, groups can strategically select other groups with similar organizational culture. The successful merger in our study involved a carefully planned process of advertising for a potential merger on forums, testing out group compatibility by participating in “trial” raid activities with potential guilds, and selecting the guild that most closely matched their own group’s culture. In our settings, this process helped prevent conflict from emerging and ensured that there was enough common ground to resolve it when it did.

Second, leaders can plan intentional opportunities to socialize members of the merged or acquired group. The leaders of the successful merger held community-wide social events in the game to help new members learn their community’s norms. They spelled out these norms in a visible list of rules. They even included the new members in both the brainstorming and voting process of changing the guild’s name to reflect that they were a single, new, cohesive unit. The leaders of the failed merger lacked any explicitly stated community rules, and opportunities for socializing the members of the new group were virtually absent. Newcomers from the merged group would only learn community norms when they broke one of the unstated social codes.

The guild leaders in the successful merger documented every successful high end raid boss achievement in a community-wide “Hall of Fame” journal. A screenshot is taken with every guild member who contributed to the achievement and uploaded to a “Hall of Fame” page.

Third and finally, our study suggested that social activities can be used to cultivate solidarity between the two merged groups, leading to increased retention of new members. We found that the successful guild merger organized an additional night of activity that was socially-oriented. In doing so, they provided a setting where solidarity between new and existing members can cultivate and motivate their members to stick around and keep playing with each other—even when it gets frustrating.

Our results suggest that by preparing in advance, ensuring some degree of cultural compatibility, and providing opportunities to socialize newcomers and cultivate solidarity, the potential for conflict resulting from mergers can be mitigated. While mergers between firms often occur to make more money or consolidate resources, the experience of the failed merger in our study shows that mergers between online communities put their entire communities at stake. We hope our work can be used by leaders in online communities to successfully manage potential conflict resulting from merging or acquiring members of other groups in a wide range of settings.

Much more detail is available our paper which will be published open access and which is currently available as a preprint.

October 17, 2018

The Cyberlaw Clinic recently filed an amicus brief (pdf) in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, on behalf of Engine Advocacy, a non-profit organization that advocates on behalf of the startup community, and Santa Clara University School of Law Professor Eric Goldman. The case involved a dispute between Airbnb, Inc. and a residential leasing company, Aimco, Inc., about the proper application of 47 U.S.C. § 230, a section of the Communications Decency Act that immunizes platforms against liability arising out of third-party speech.

Aimco, in seeking to hold Airbnb liable, advances two theories that threaten to undermine the protections of Section 230: that Airbnb is liable for providing “brokerage services” that support the creation and use of third-party content, and that Airbnb itself generates content that contributes to the unlawful offers posted on the platform. The amicus brief argues that both theories of liability attempt to short-circuit the protections of Section 230. The brief further argues that a narrow reading of Section 230 would have negative consequences for the startup ecosystem. Aimco’s interpretation of Section 230 would instead work to the advantage of large platforms that are much more capable of absorbing large amounts of risk. This would result in less competition and less innovation online, which would be detrimental not only to platform operators but also to Internet users, as well as contrary to one of the primary purposes of Section 230. The brief concludes by asking the court to affirm the District Court’s proper application of Section 230.

Fall 2018 Cyberlaw Clinic students Sally Kagay, Maia Levy Daniel, and Saranna Soroka wrote this amicus brief with assistance from Clinical Instructor Mason Kortz. The Clinic team worked closely with Evan Engstrom of Engine and Professor Goldman to develop the arguments in the brief.

October 15, 2018

Universities have automated many aspects of teaching, instruction, student services, libraries, personnel management, building management, and finance, leading to a profusion of discrete data about the activities of individuals. Universities see great value of these data for learning analytics, faculty evaluation, strategic decisions, and other sensitive matters. Commercial entities, governments, and private individuals also see value in these data and are besieging universities with requests for access.
In this talk, Christine L. Borgman discusses the conflicts & challenges of balancing obligations for stewardship, trust, privacy, confidentiality – and often academic freedom – with the value of exploiting data for analytical and commercial purposes.
For more information about this event visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-09/open-data-grey-data-and-stewardship
Photo by @AlyssaAGoodman

October 10, 2018

Welcome students and parents, faculty and staff, trustees and alumni to the Richard T. Greener Quadrangle.

Thank you, Linda Carter Griffith, for blazing your own trail as the first Assistant Head of School for Equity, Inclusion and Wellness—not only at Andover but among independent schools anywhere.

Thank you, Ava and Thaddeus. Your words remind us why this work is so vitally important and exactly what this ceremony symbolizes.

Rejji Hayes ’93: Your commitment to the ideals of equity and inclusion strengthens our resolve to act with courage and urgency on behalf of each of our 1,144 students. We felt the impact of your leadership at the 50th anniversary of AfLatAm last spring, when more than 400 alumni returned to campus to celebrate a foundational source of these efforts.

Building on the work of generations and guided by the priorities of the Knowledge and Goodness campaign, we join today to mark the history of Andover’s connections with underrepresented communities and highlight our commitment to equity and inclusion.
None of this would be possible without the vision of a singular donor. As much as we would like to put this person’s name in lights, we are respecting their wish for anonymity.

Please join me in a round of applause for the incredibly generous donor who made today’s dedication possible.

With humility and purpose, this individual asks us to reflect and act upon a founding principle of our school in the name of Richard T. Greener, Class of 1865. Our benefactor states:

We honor one man to represent all those who have enriched the Academy through the diversity of their thought and backgrounds and those who, for generations to come, will help Andover live up to its ideal of youth from every quarter.

With enthusiastic support of the Board of Trustees, we have the great privilege to honor the trailblazing work of Mr. Greener, a scholar and teacher, lawyer and diplomat, whose service during the post-Civil War era both inspired progress and ignited debate.
All that he stood for – argued for and educated others about – embodied the ideals of equity and inclusion to which we aspire today.

With Samuel Phillips Hall rising above us, the Richard T. Greener Quadrangle holds a special place in our Andover lives. Just three weeks ago, the senior class and I took part in the Vista Walk, a tradition begun by my predecessor, Barbara Chase. The early morning walk toward the steps of Sam Phil marks the first day of classes. The next time we share that walk, we will be joined by the entire faculty on June 2, 2019, Andover’s 241st Commencement.

This gathering space shines with natural beauty and historic significance. Last spring, students gathered here to protest gun violence. In 1989 a student demonstration, led by Brian Gittens ’89, ultimately led to the school’s annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

As we dedicate our most iconic patch of land, the trustees and I are excited to share that an additional gift will establish an endowed fund to advance equity and inclusion programs in Mr. Greener’s name.

It is truly gratifying to know that our extended Andover community believes as deeply as we do in the importance of these initiatives that benefit both the adults and students on our campus.

In fact, philanthropy in honor of Mr. Greener dates back to 1989 when a scholarship was established in his name. Seeking to support underrepresented students of color, the Richard T. Greener 1865 Endowed Scholarship has made a difference in the lives of more than a dozen Andover students spanning three decades.

Two Andover alumni and Greener Scholars were present in spring 2016 when Harvard recognized Mr. Greener with a portrait on display in Annenberg Dining Hall. One of those alumni, Robert Rush ’14, and his mom, Arlette, are with us today.

We’re also delighted to have our current Greener Scholar joining us—senior Jamille “Jami” Taveras ’19 of Lawrence, Massachusetts. In a letter to the donors who established her scholarship, Jami reflects on the opportunities that have, in her words, “propelled her education and redefined what it means to go for things I want in life.”

Our admission team meets thousands of bright and motivated students with a host of talents and interests. But in simplest terms, they are looking for young people of integrity and promise who have the most to contribute to Andover and the most to gain from this diverse community and immersive education.

Jami is exactly that student.

Like most of her peers, Jami’s schedule is packed with academic rigor and extracurricular passions. Fluent in Spanish and proud of her Latina heritage, Jami is co-president of the Spanish Club and on the board of Alianza Latina. She co-founded the Criminal Investigation Club to bond with other students who share a passion for science, math, and psychology. And, yes, in addition to analyzing fingerprints, they do watch episodes of CSI!

Jami wrote:

It feels good to know there are a lot of people on my side, lifting me up and taking pride in my success.

Judging by what we know about Mr. Greener, my hunch is that he, too, would be proud of students like Jami, and Robert, and all those who have come before them.
Consider what Mr. Greener shared with his Andover classmates when he returned to campus for his 50th reunion in 1915. Reflecting on his diplomatic service in Vladivostok, Russia, at the height of the Russo-Japanese War, he said the following:

“I felt all the time that the institutions with which I had been connected—Phillips Academy and Harvard—had demanded something of me in character, intelligence and in worth.”

Richard T. Greener was an intellectual force and a visionary leader whose character blossomed at Andover. The qualities he displayed as a student were instrumental years later as he navigated civil rights issues and international conflicts. These are the kinds of qualities we see in our students today—rigor and purpose in their work, shared values of knowledge and goodness, respect for differences.

I’d like to close with a final word from Mr. Greener’s address to his Andover classmates. His reflection, more than 100 years ago, rings true today as we aspire to become a more inclusive and equitable Andover.

If one have not the disposition in him, it makes no matter what school he is trained, he will not be a success. It is the desire to prove oneself worthy of all estate and lead his comrades on.

On behalf of the Phillips Academy Board of Trustees, I dedicate the Richard T. Greener Quadrangle and ask that we all prove ourselves worthy of this important endeavor.

October 09, 2018

The Berkman Klein Center's geek team helps build amazing tools that help us study the Internet and advance the public interest.
In this talk they discuss and demo some of the tools we produce, including TagTeam and Media Cloud.
Learn more about this event:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-02/software-social-good